Keeping Your Fat Yap Shut

It seems I don't learn. Or at least I learn at a pace that is imperceptible to gods and man.

First, go back and read this. Then come back and I'll give you yet more examples of how I should just keep my fat yap shut.

First of all, what I'm about to tell you happened during scripture study, when we're struggling to get our kids to pay attention and, I'll be honest, sometimes to pay attention ourselves. We do our scriptures in the study, where a television, three computers and an entire library of scratch paper, pencils, and crayons beckon.

We were reading Third Nephi Chapter Three, in which Giddianhi, the leader of the Gadianton Robbers, sends a letter to Lachoneus, the Nephite governor, basically saying that the robbers are the tops, the Mona Lisa, the Colosseum, and such. I tried to sup up that part of the speech by saying, "well, this guy thought he and his army were all that and a bag of chips." Forgetting, of course, that there would be little ptichers listening that would have to be filled. So I had to explain what "all that and a bag of chips" meant which, of course, led into other interesting segues, the least of which was a week ago when I took our oldest to Webelos after Michelle and I had a sneaky lunch at Pickett's Bambinos he insisted he could smell French fries in the car and I convinced him it was his Scout shirt.

So five minutes later we're back to studying the scriptures, and then I get to the part where the Nephites decide to gather all together to defend themselves against the robbers and, in my not-keeping-my-fat-yap-shut way, I tried to explain it like this: How would it be if we had to leave Sugar City because El Guapo, the big, dangerous guy who wants to kill us, was coming to get us, so we had to go somewhere else to be with a big group of other people to be safe?

That, of course, led to this:

Used under the fair use doctrine for commentary purposes.

So another five minutes later, we were able to finish our scripture study, a good fifteen minutes behind schedule. All because I haven't yet learned to keep my fat yap shut.

Or maybe I just need to wait a few more years until our kids are fully thrust through the doorway that leads to cultural literacy among the Davidsons, which would be of enormous relief to me.