"Oh, the fruit of the Spirit's not a lemon
The fruit of the Spirit's not a lemon
If you wanna be a lemon, you might as well hear it
You can't be a fruit of the Spirit"
Self-control. I know I am capable of exhibiting that particular fruit now, because I resisted the urge to serve it up to people who have given me the what-for about homeschooling.
Our 6-year-old was whimpering about an impressive set of scratches on his torso, which he had obtained in the most glorious falling-out-of-a-tree incident seen in some time at the L homestead. We happened to be sitting in a tiny, crowded waiting room at the time. I asked Moe if he thought he'd live, or if he thought Laertes had scratched him with a poisoned fencing sword, like Hamlet.
Moe acted out a dramatic death scene, then popped open an eyelid, sat up and very seriously said, "Mom, you know it wasn't a fencing sword. It was a real sword. That was part of the trick. He wanted to make sure Hamlet died, remember?"
I apologized for my error and assured him I did remember, and then another thought struck him.
"Mom, Hamlet didn't mean to kill Polonius, right? I mean, I know he was a dirty ol' spy and all, but still, Hamlet didn't know it was Polonius hiding back there. If Hamlet wanted to kill Claudius and not Polonius, why didn't he just throw the curtain back and see who was hiding there?"
I was greatly enjoying the conversation when I happened to glance up to see a circle of staring faces and bugging eyes.
Moments before, a jolly homeschooler-bashing conversation had been running its course among the public schoolers, peppered with the same tired arguments and invoking that one imaginary homeschool family that someone sister's cousin's husband's uncle knows, the family whose children are all three seconds away from permanent retardation purely because their selfish parents who are too lazy to get up in the morning won't allow them to attend school.
Grinning at them all, I resisted the urge to say, "What? Don't they teach Shakespeare in first grade at YOUR school?"
Progress!
