ok, update: he returned to making noodles, and has dropped the spark plug effort. noodles apparently remain more fun, no matter what your gender.

as he was making noodles, he started asking again about god and jesus and mary, and who takes care of them, who loves them, etc etc. in response to a question (the specifics of which i don't remember as most were pretty much the same), i said "well, they are just filled with love..." and then he looked at me and he said "but why are we bad sometimes?" and THEN he asked "mommy, why do people forget god and mary and jesus sometimes?"

i looked at him and said nothing for a long time. i was trying to remember if i had ever used that expression in the past, and i am fairly certain i did not. i do not do a lot of talking about god et al, preferring to answer the questions as they come, so this one just stunned me. i can say with certainty that i did not provide carter with a clear answer. (see previous posts).

though, had i returned to st agnes and run into the very nice, very devout older woman that was there the day carter and i poked our heads in, i am sure she could have provided him with a very clear answer. this, apparently is one of the perks of faith, particularly one in which a governing body has been mulling over the official answers to complicated questions for about 2000-odd years (as opposed to a tired mom who does it on the fly). the morning we peeked in, i told her that he had wanted to see the church, and she went off on a long and very enthusiastic lesson in what this church was (god's house), and you come here to talk to him (so far, so good), and then she explained to carter that god was in that teeny tiny box way up there on the altar (quizzical look from carter), and that when he was old enough, there would be a special day when god would come to him as a little piece of bread and that he would be allowed to eat it and have god inside of him...

this, i can assure you, makes virtually no sense to a 3-year-old. and bless him, he said nothing embarassing, but the look on his face pretty much translated to "you have GOT to be kidding me."

on a more grounded, mundane topic--we had a slow start this morning. ava woke up coughing at 4:30, and never went back to sleep until 6:30, at which point carter woke up. i am pretty much catatonic, but i let ava sleep in and we went to school late.

but she was very anxious to get to school, so that was good.

so far, our school experience has been very interesting. it is amazing how much the other students and teacher act as a motivator. she came home and said "autumn taught me how to color in the lines mom!" i was flabbergasted. if i had DARED to suggest that there was a way in which she could "improve" her coloring, she would have had my head. not that i thought she needed to improve anything, but she has definitely absorbed the aesthetic principles of her peers. personally, i like her iconoclastic artistic efforts. i guess it will have a positive impact on her writing skills too.

that and she is suddenly determined to conquer some of the "academic" skills she has only shown a peripheral interest in until now, and of those things that she has been interested in she just pursues with even more intensity.

she keeps track of all of the kids in her class, what their skills are, who is better at what than she is, who is not well behaved, who earned the teacher's praise and why...as a matter of fact, she does this for a lot of kids that are not in her class too (the whole school gets together for lunch and recess), constantly evaluating her position. i don't think she is competing with the other kids per se, but instead she is trying to figure out if she should be competing with herself. given that she yells at her feet when she makes a mistake ice-skating, this is not surprising.

however, i could do without the songs etc that she learns at recess...they aren't technically "bad" but they are annoying.