Nater Makes Us Smile

I shamelessly stole this from our good friend, Peter. It is just too funny.


______________________________________________
The Thompsons are officially gone now. Mrs. Thompson left with Bradford and Grace on Tuesday morning, by plane, and Mr. Thompson and Benjamin and Nater drove up, starting Tuesday afternoon.Monday I went to their house in the morning and helped them pack up and clean house all day.

The kids were going to be staying at their neighbor’s house that day, but Nathaniel preferred to stay and help me work all day (except lunch). So he and I packed up a ton of stuff! He was quite excited about getting to write on one of his boxes: Nater did this. Sadly, however, this turned out more like “Zoter pip thz” or something...

So, the original plan was that the Briggs family would come pick up Benjamin and Nathaniel Tuesday morning, when Mrs. Thompson would fly out with Bradford and Grace. Mrs. Briggs would then take Benjamin and Nater out with her kids to the theater, to watch March of the Penguins. Fun, right?However, on the way over to our house for dinner Monday evening, (I was riding with them, having helped them at their house all day) Mrs. Thompson informed the disappointed boys that no, Mrs. Briggs was not taking them to the theater the next day, because she had just changed the movie to Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Horrors! Mrs. Thompson, of course, had not seen it, and didn’t know if it was a bad movie. But she did know that the first version was freakishly horrifying for little kids, (and I was able to support that claim very strongly) and the new one would probably be even scarier. So new plan: Ben and Nater would spend the night at our house and watch March of the Penguins at our house in the morning. Then Mrs. Briggs would come and pick them up afterwards.

Mrs. Thompson then instructed them not to believe it when the Briggs kids claimed that the movie wasn’t scary, but that they wouldn’t know because they were used to scariness. Nathaniel firmly established the fact for us all that no, he could not be scared. He, also, was used to scariness, and it wasn’t a problem for him. He couldn’t get scared.

Skip ahead to bedtime. Benjamin and Nathaniel and AJ and I stayed up talking for a little while. After I told them the story of Jesus feeding the five-thousand and about Jesus calming the waves and walking on water, and after we made up stories for a while, everyone getting 30 seconds to add on to what the previous story-teller had said, we “went to sleep”. But I got a blanket on and started humming like a ghost, and moving toward Nathaniel. Nathaniel was begging me to stop, after he figured out what it was. “Please stop. Please stop! You’re scaring the guts out of me! Please stop! You’re scaring my guts out of me!”

So I took the blanket off: “Hey Nathaniel, I thought you told your mom you were used to scariness and you couldn’t get scared.” Then the intelligent little boy (he’d make a good debater. :-D) says: “That’s true. I can’t be scared! You were just scaring my guts, like I said. You were just scaring my guts. They were wiggling around inside me telling each other ‘ooh! That’s a ghost!’ But you didn’t scare me. Just my guts.”

Haha! Nater, I’ll miss you!

Then he was too scared to sleep on the floor, because we had pretended to be ghosts. No. Sorry. His guts were too scared to sleep on the floor, so he climbed into bed with me. But Benjamin couldn’t sleep on the floor alone. Now that would be scary! :-D So he also got into my bed. After they both fell asleep, with me squishing up tight with my back against the wall, I climbed out of bed and slept on Nater’s mattress on the floor. :-D
____________________________________________