The Traditional Family

[porphyry]

 I always suspected that Malkhos and I were born too late.

Every night, I read Madeline four of her favorite books before she goes to bed.  One is called Bludbird's Nest.  The story is fairly simple:  the narrative begins in autumn and chronicles a mother bird working on her project of building a nest for the spring.  As the pages are turned and the story is told about how she builds the nest, brown yarn, strand by strand, takes the shape of a nest.  The last page of the story features a pop-up nest with four baby bluebirds in it.

This is where Madeline gets confused.  "Where is the daddy bird?"  she asks, and I must admit, the first time she asked me this question, she took me by surprise.  "I don't know," I said.  "Maybe off looking for more worms."

But Madeline didn't accept this.  "No, it's that one right there!" she said, pointing to the largest of the baby birds.

"Is it?" I said.

"Yes," she replied. "And that's the Grammy bird, and the Papa bird, and the Andrew bird!"

"That's right," I said.

Later, Malkhos said to me, "May God make sure that the Department of Family Services never knows that we're telling her that a family has both a mother and a father in it." 

"Of course not," I said.  "It might be actionable."

Comments

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I feel my children have grown up in this very old-fashioned, insulated world, protected by this stable, unchanging environment we've settled on.

Madeline is very keen on my mother and father although she plays coy with my dad. It's this little game they have; he asks her for a hug and she plays hard to get. Unless, of course, she wants something, like candy. Then she freely gives her love. :-)

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

Clever gal, that! She will get along just fine in this oh so modern world, I gather;=)