My oldest turned 20 a few weeks ago, which means I am now in my THIRD DECADE of trying to teach children how to function in the real world. Over the years I have developed some shorthand. I no longer say, "Sweetie, if you turn away from the table while you're eating you'll get food in the carpet and we'll get bugs and stains and entropic squalor." Instead I say, "Knees!" -- because if your knees are under the table, your mouth will most likely be over it, thereby cutting down on the entropic squalor.
If someone picks up a hunk of meat and gnaws at it while it is impaled on the fork (instead of cutting it into bite-sized pieces), I always say, "We are not barbarians." Stella is my most carnivorous child, and my youngest child, and so she is the most likely to be reminded that we are in fact civilized people in this house even if an outsider might occasionally pick up a different vibe.
Yesterday only four of us were here: Alex is back at school and the Scouts were camping. We went out for brunch at a place that had -- oh rapture and delight -- a chocolate fountain. After her brunch was eaten Stella got a plate with some chocolate-dipped treats on it, and when they were eaten she had a moment of forgetting that we don't lick our fingers in restaurants. "We are not barbarians," her older brother told her firmly.
"When I grow up," she said longingly, "I want to be a barbarian."
It's good to have goals.
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