Tuesday, January 20, 2009

History and Color

No, this isn't going where you think it is. I turned on the inauguration coverage this morning and tried to get Jack interested, but it wasn't going to happen. He was much more concerned that his Planet Heroes would like the menu I was trying to plan for the next two weeks.

Tonight we began reading Farmer Boy aloud at bedtime. We looked at some of the pictures and talked about how this was a story about a real little boy who lived a long time ago. The story went into how Almanzo's mother made his clothes from the wool from his father's sheep, and it included a sentence that sent Jack into a tailspin. Are you ready?

"His underwear was creamy white, but his mother had dyed the wool for his outside clothes."

As soon as the sentence was out of my mouth, I heard, "What??"

Me: His underwear was white, but his mom dyed the other clothes different colors.

Jack: It was WHITE?? (This was accompanied by him grabbing my head and turning me to look him right in the eyes. Surely your mom can't look in your eyes and lie, right?)

Me: Yes.

Jack: Why?

Me: Well, his mom probably didn't want to go to the trouble of messing with his underwear when she had a bunch of other work to do.

Jack: It was white?

This went on for about five minutes. He still didn't seem to believe me, but I tried explaining that sometimes people do wear white underwear. Not everyone has a dinosaur on their backside each day. Shocking. And now we know: Sometimes color does matter.

4 comments:

Amber said...

That is sooooo funny!

Angela said...

This totally cracked me up! I don't know if my boys even own a pair of white undies..hmm..HOWEVER this post totally gave me a cruel mental image of my dad walking around in his white BVDs and cowboy boots! *gag*

Anonymous said...

And now he understands just how rough life was back then. :)

Carol S said...

Yeah, ds 6 doesn't have much in the way of white underwear either, but I don't know that he would have found so surprising. :lol: