Month: September 2003

Sunday morning, after brunch, we headed off to B&N pick up Katherine some books. More on that below, perhaps.

So we got into the store, and wandered back toward the Kid Section. Katherine found about a dozen things that she wanted between Point A and Point B, of course, none of which were suitable. (I fear that by the time she is ready to appreciate Uno, she will no longer appreciate Hello Kitty, so getting a Hello Kitty Uno Set is probably right out.)

But once we were in the Kid Section, books and similar paraphernalia were utterly passe. Instead, her whole attention, vision, very existential being was focused on one thing, and one thing only: the train.

(B&Ns have a wooden train set in their Kid Sections, to give kids things to play with while Mom & Dad look around for books for them. It works, and while kids being distracted from looking at books themselves is probably a bad thing, being distracted from pulling several dozen books at random off all the shelves is probably a good thing, so it’s a wash.)

So while I browsed books, Katherine played with the trains. And there were maybe four or five other kids there, doing the same thing, younger and older, with other parents hovering nearby.

And she was the best-behaved of the lot.

Not perfect, by any means. Not a paragon. But rather than screaming and yelling and pitching a fit (or a caboose) when her train ran into the barrier of someone else’s train (or someone else standing in the way), Katherine just insistently hooted, “Toot-toot!” and waited fro them to clear the track.

And if she sometimes didn’t notice when she was in someone else’s way, when it was pointed out, she moved, rather than ignoring the situation or pitching a fit (etc.).

It was really pretty keen, and made a nice follow-up to the earlier morning activities.

See, Sunday was Kitten’s first day of Sunday School. No more sitting in the Nursery during the service and playing with toys, pulled into the church for Communion at the end, but now it was time for actual Scholastic Education into Theological Verities and Religious Inquiry. Or, failing that, learning songs about Joy and Jesus and drawing with crayons.

Problem is (aside from her seriously missing playing in the Nursery), the Sunday School is about half an hour or forty-five minutes, encompassing only the first half of the service. In the middle, whilst announcements about various goings-on are made, the kids are sent back into the sanctuary to sit with their parents, tra-la.

Well, I wasn’t ready for that. And Katherine, whose gyrations and antics and desire to be entertained are okay for the five-to-ten minutes during and after Communion, found herself (or her parents) tested by a half-hour of prayers and responses and kneeling and similar church-going activities. Not a happy mixture.

Not that she was a crazy girl or anything (once she was informed that climbing over the back of the pew was Not Allowed), but she was active, she wanted Mommy & Daddy’s attention, she wanted to go back and forth along the kneelers from one end of the pew to the other, she wanted to play with her stuffed kitty, and have Mommy & Daddy play, too, etc.

The good news was, there was nobody else in our pew.

The bad news was, we were sitting (as is our wont) in the front right pew, literally in front of God and Everybody.

Hrm.

So afterwards, I cast my mind back on when John and I were young’uns at church, back up in the Bay Area. And what I remembered (aside from the threat of Dire Paternal Discipline afterwards) was that we had little religious prayer books and the like to look at and keep us entertained whilst the adults were doing That Boring Stuff.

So that’s why were picking up books, to keep her entertained in the pews. And that’s why it was nice to see that Katherine actually could behave herself.

Hey … I wonder if we could bring one of those train sets to the church …

“Toot-toot!” “Amen.”