My personal greatest joy from raising children hasn't come from their unconditional love, their adoring looks of admiration, the generous compliments from patient strangers, or the piles of handcrafted notes and gifts. No, the moments I hold nearest and dearest to my heart are when some phrase uttered from their innocent mouth stops me in my tracks and has me seriously thinking how complex those little minds are. Now onto the story...
My three lucky boys were given the disgusting task of clearing and wiping out the pantry shelves to eradicate our problem pest...the common kitchen moth. It hasn't been a pretty last couple of hours. We're finding leftover cereal bags that have now become cheap moth hotels, and opened boxes of pasta that baby moths (aka worms) are happily munching on as fuel for their growing bodies. Probably the most disturbing are the hundreds of moth nests lined up in the crevices of the shelves just waiting to hatch open and start their worthless life cycle all over again.
Alex says, "I bet thewe's a lot of moths getting mawwied in thewe."
How sweet is the simple logic of a newly six year old? A little background information: just before the gerbils had their babies, we pronounced the mom and dad husband and wife once we found Tibby, the dad, happily riding piggy back on his fiance, Megan. What a beautiful wedding!
I have to be realistic here; I don't expect my children to follow in footsteps that I myself did not lay. Jake was an out of wedlock baby, and he is well aware that his father and I were married when he was nearly a year old. Therefore, I feel like a hypocritical mother teaching them that babies are the product of matrimony. My lesson of choice is that babies
should be made with love and preparation. There is nothing more wonderful than being ready to parent a child, and most people just aren't until they've found a suitable mate and settled into a comfortable life first.
Regardless, Alex has deduced that the moths must have somehow performed an abundance of wedding ceremonies deep in the nooks and crannies of our pantry in order to be setting up shop and creating families at every corner.
I COL'd (chuckled out loud since it wasn't quite enough to be a LOL) when I overheard this conversation...
Toby says, "I bet they didn't get married and that's why there are so many of them."
Jake says, "If they were ready to be parents then there would only be a few moths because they'd have been responsible and had a normal number of babies. But because they weren't married yet, the men moths had babies with ALL of the girl moths instead of just his wife."
Toby says, "Irresponsible moths. Now we're losing money on all our food because we have to feed all these babies."
Jake says, "I wonder how long it would have been until the babies found boyfriends and girlfriends and had a bunch of their own babies? Then we'd really have been losing money."
Then he shouts, "MOM! How long does it take for a moth worm to become an adult?"
And now for my moment...Toby says, "I wonder if Wal-Mart has moths."
Damn, I love my kids.
