Anyone that has kids, or that has been around kids knows that you must watch what you say and do because they will repeat and mimic everything that you do. There are times when this makes me so very proud as a parent. When I see my son help encourage his teammates on the ball court, or watch my daughter softly speak and pat her horse on the head I feel like my wife, and I are all star parents that should be touring the country giving parenting lectures. On the flip side of that coin, when my son picks on his sister because he likes to agitate her, and she retaliates with her hands or sharp tongue, I start thinking that maybe I shouldn’t be planning that world tour quite yet. At a potluck at church last Sunday, some friends and I were sitting around talking about this very thing. I thought it was only fitting to share some of these stories that we laugh about now but made us cringe at the time they happened.
A young farm girl had spent her days riding around the farm with her dad and their hired man. She helped do the chores, check the cows and make sure that everything was in order. One particular pen of replacement heifers was a sore spot for the hired man. They couldn’t seem to figure out that the grass on the outside of the pasture was indeed not as green as the grass on the inside. Every day they would check these heifers, and every day they would have to put some back in where they belonged. At a gathering of the girl’s mothers church friends, the girl came running into the room and excitedly announced to the hired man, “Ralph! Ralph! Those son of a b*&^h heifers are out in the yard again!” I don’t know what happened next, but I can be pretty sure that Ralph the hired man got threatened with a bar of soap for his lunch.
When my son was probably about three years old, he spent his days helping me look over the calving cows and the first-time heifers. One brisk morning one of these first calf heifers was doing what heifers do best, be stupid and cause chaos. She thought that the calf on the ground looked more appealing than the pain coming from her backside that hadn’t been born yet. I started pushing her towards the corral where I could lock her in the barn away from anything else so she would focus on the task at hand. After she repeatedly kept trying to get away and I was getting more than a little agitated, she started getting a new name with some colorful adjectives attached to describe her. We finally got her to the barn, and it would be a few days later after Sunday school when my wife informed me that she didn’t approve of my description of the cows in my son’s presence. See he thought that the new phrases he learned chasing cows were appropriate to tell the Sunday school teacher and his classmates. His mother did not.
A neighbor back home was out in the pasture checking cows with his young son when the pickup broke down a few miles from the house. This was before cell phones, and the man and his very young son had to walk back to the house for help. The longer they walked, the more the man grumbled about the broken pickup. His boy, being just old enough to start putting words together, picked up on a few of them, although thankfully he couldn’t fully pronounce them yet. That didn’t stop him from telling his mother in his best broken English that the “ucking ickup” broke down and they had to walk home.
I’ve learned the hard way that sometimes when you feel the urge to rename one of God’s creatures, it’s best to make sure little ears aren’t there to repeat their vocabulary lesson. That’s all for this time, I’ll be out here riding glue factory rejects and chasing disappointing happy meals. Keep tabs on your side of the barbed wire and God Bless!