My Girl Kicks A*

Literally.

At AWANAs Wednesday night, she and another child, a boy, got into a scuffle. In a matter of seconds, she had him on the floor, sitting on him.

He pinched the crap out of her--left a bruise and everything.

Aside from the obvious "you shouldn't be fighting" and "it's not nice to sit on people," her father and I can't help but giggle that our girl--always a lady--gave this boy a beat down. Even if he doesn't have bruises on him, and she does, she gave this boy something to consider:

It's not nice to fight and it's not nice to fight a girl. Especially MY girl.

Of course, we gave her ice for the bruised arm, and I spent the trip home discussing the finer points of Wrong (as in, it's not a worse wrong to pinch the crap out of someone who is sitting on you--it's ALL wrong. The sitting AND the pinching.)

I had to work to not giggle and laugh while hearing about the incident. And I had to also try to explain the nature of sin: To God, all wrong things are the same. To us, there may seem to be degrees of wrongness, and some things may seem to be more wrong than others, but to God, ALL Wrong Things are WRONG. And, in this case, sitting on top of someone and pinching the person sitting on top of you are BOTH equally wrong.

My Sweetie, however, seems to have blind spots to his "not my daughter" and his "my daughter will be" insanity. He was downright proud that his daughter kicked ass.

One thing we did have to note, though, is that while AWANAs is a Christian based program, run by a local Baptist congregation (one that has, in my lifetime, had very strict guidelines for girls behavior) handled it with love, care, and humor. They did not get their panties in a wad over my girl's lack of decorum, unlike my niece's preschool teachers, who got all knickers in a knot over an "incident" involving UNO cards and a register grate, and her lack of interest in Abe Lincoln.

Given my life-long experience with both denominations, I can say that whatever trepidation I had in entrusting my not-overly-ladylike daughter to a group of Christians with a history of narrow-mindedness (my opinion, thank-you-very-much) and hearing about the "incidents" my niece is causing at the local Catholic institution, I'm rather glad that we chose the local Baptists.

At least the Baptists love and respect my little spitfire for who she is--and they handle her indiscretions much the way her father and I do. No one approaches us with faces that look like we've shoved cat turds under their noses and no tidy-whities twisted over what amounts to being run-of-the-mill situations when you have groups of children ages 5-7 together for an hour and half every week.

And before you get your boxers in bunches, this is not a rant about other faiths. I give all faiths a generous helping of skepticism. Even mine. Maybe even especially mine. I have my doubts and concerns over some of the tenets of the Episcopal (Anglican) traditions and beliefs, too, but those are diatribes for a different blog, not this one, and if ever our church begins imposing inane and insane gender biased pronouncements upon my daughter, they'll be getting their holier-than-I Hanes unstuck from their cracks.

Oh, and for the record, my daughter does wear her panties each and every week when attending AWANAs, which is better than her record when she attended preschool there.