“Our family says the same prayer every night before we eat dinner as a way of collecting ourselves after a busy day. We say it together, and we always end with ‘Amen.’ Or rather, we used to end it that way.
“You see, for reasons known only to four-year-olds, my oldest son was obsessed with talking about ‘peanut butter’ and ‘eyeballs’ for most of his four-year-old year. My wife and I mostly put up with this good-naturedly, but our then-one-year-old son absorbed this language for months on end. Our older son gradually grew out of his peanut-butter-and-eyeballs phase, as children generally do, but our little one held this memory deep inside him.
“One night months later, our younger son, by this time two years old, burst out at the end of our dinner prayer: ‘Amen-Peanut Butter-Eyeballs!’ My wife and I laughed, rolled our eyes, and we all started eating.” -from a Braver-Wiser reflection by Christian Schmidt
What have you heard a child say that made you laugh but stuck with you?
