Sickness, Swooning and Swearing

Sweet Miss Mary was all spiffied up for church today, shoes tied, bows in her hair when the phone rang. It was the Instacare nurse: “Mrs. L? Mary has tested positive for strep. Would you like me to call in a prescription?”

WHAT!?! I took Mary to Instacare Thursday night because she complained of a very sore throat. They did a quick culture, patted my head(they thought I was an overly-cautious first-time mom) and sent us home with advice to give her some Motrin. I kept her out of school Friday but by Saturday she was chipper as ever. Xander had a birthday party, our friends came over last night with their 4 young sons and Mary went and played at Sarah’s house yesterday– Sarah with the one week old baby sister.

So now we’ve effectively infected half the neighborhood! I’m no germaphobe but I feel so sorry and sad– especially taking illness to a house with a new baby.

Mary cried and begged to go to church. She has three darling teachers who dote on her and the whole group of little princesses. She pulled out a piece of paper and started scribbling random letters on it, “lettrr mmmmary ysr.” “Now give this to my teachers, my fwee nice teachers and tell them I am sick and sad and I love them.”

So Erik stayed home with Mary and Xander(sick as well) and I took the rest to church. We settled happily into a prime bench without the usual fight of who gets to sit by mom. Ben saw us sit down(he goes to church 1/2 hour early to prepare the sacrament) and came back to ask me to move one row back. A slight turn of my head made his request clear. If we moved back just one row he would have a clear line of sight to the girl of his dreams. 🙂

I really don’t blame him. She is so cute. And she had on the ca-utest dress today(you would dig her style Jan). I almost asked M. where she bought her dress but decided Ben wouldn’t be thrilled to see his mom and un-girlfriend wearing the same thing.

During sacrament meeting I suddenly got great inspiration for my Sunday School lesson the next hour. It’s always like that– did God build a bridge for the Israelites across the Red Sea? No, he waited till the last second and just opened the sea. So I was getting all these last second, sea-opening ideas and flipping through my scriptures when Gabe became fixated on a certain page.

“Look at all those swear words in the Bible mom!”

“If those are bad words why are they in the Bible?”

“What’s the difference between Bible swear words and other swear words?”

“So what does that mean? So is the ‘s’ word a Bible swear word or the other kind?”

Oh man, I am in for it with this kid. He has a total fascination for this sort of thing. The other boys didn’t hear much of swearing until jr. high so it wasn’t an issue. But Gabe is acutely aware of these mysterious, forbidden words. He once asked me to write them down just so he would know what they are. I declined; he’ll see them in writing soon enough.