Careful – you never know what'll stick

Today's the random, who-knows-what-we'll-get day on the blog and I decided to ask Sonny Lemmons to give me his best Lewis Grizzard (the late, great Georgia humorist), or actually his best Sonny. He's a native Southerner who I'm just getting to know but I love to see his heart in how he responds to what life throws at him, which can be quite a lot. Without further delay, heeerree's Sonny!

Kids used to scare me. Now I'm a stay-at-home parent. God loves to play "Gotcha!" with me.

One of my first exposures to dealing with kids – and learning how much one has to be CAREFUL when speaking around them - came one evening under the warmth of the summer Georgia sun. My friends Scott*, Trevor* and I were engaged in the manly art of charbroiling animal flesh. Scott's two daughters (Gail*, age 2 & Tina*, age 4) were with us because that's clearly where toddlers should be: with men who are holding sharp spears and raw meat while standing around a charcoal altar. At one point, Scott got it into his noggin that he could flip a chicken breast into the air and have it safely land back on the grill. You can imagine how well this went.

Gail, who saw that daddy dropped something, wanted to help him clean up. So she rushed over to grab said half-cooked chicken now covered with pine straw. Being the closest person near her, I reached out, held her back, and explained that that was a special piece of "Georgia Asphalt Chicken," and that we didn't eat Georgia Asphalt Chicken.

(Photo by Dave Perkins)

Flash-forward five years later. Gail still wants to order and try "Georgia Asphalt Chicken" when they eat out.

I now know from my own offspring how much these little vessels pick up on what we say, how we behave, and that - for better or for worse - we mold them. We shape them. In ways and with attitudes we may not even be conscious of. So I've learned to guard what I say and do, in the hope that my kid will want for something better than Georgia Asphalt Chicken.

* = The names have been changed to protect us from the wrath of child services.

Sonny Lemmons is a stay-at-home dad, a writer of stuff (follow him on his blog at lookthrough.net and @sonnylemmons on Twitter), a receiver of grace, and a drinker of coffee. His wife Ashley loves him, but still doesn't get his sense of humor, either.