My son has somehow picked up the notion of begging to do things by asking for just “five minutes”, “five minutes mom”. He can hardly say those words, but he sure does know how to beg and make them sound cute. “Outside mom, outside….5 minutes…5 minutes mom.” Everything he wants to do is just gonna take “5 minutes.”
Little Tucker boy has also learned how to pray recently, and boy does he love it. We say the Hail Mary prayer, and he’ll pray anywhere, anytime. If someone even mentions the word pray or prayer, he immediately perks up and starts asking me to “Say prayers? Say prayers?” The other night, a character on a tv show said “prayer” and Tucker turned right around to me, and by God, we needed to pray the Hail Mary right in the middle of the movie…..2 times.
He loves to follow along and anxiously looks up and waits for me to tell him the next word to say. Of course he frequently pauses to say “I can’t, I can’t” when it’s time to say a phrase like “they womb Jesus” or “blessed art thou amongst women.” So we have to break it down pretty good, one or two words at a time. Other times he just skips the “arts and thous.” However imperfect it may sound, I’ve never heard a sweeter Hail Mary than Tucker’s.
It’s a pretty special prayer to me and even more special to hear him pray it because it was a Hail Mary that we were asking for and praying when he came into this world “lifeless and gray”, and it was a Hail Mary when he pulled through it. It may not say anything about a Hail Mary on his medical chart, but right there in black and white– it says all markers of end-stage organ failure disappeared. I can remember a doctor coming to talk to me the next morning, sort of without explanation, who said “It was a rough start, but everything that could go right, did go right. He is doing as good as he possibly could.”
So every time I hear Tucker’s Hail Mary, I can’t help but to smile and tell him “God must really love hearing your prayers,” and that’s for many reasons he cannot yet understand. But of course that always leads to his bright little eyes looking up at me asking “Again? Again? Say prayers again? Five minutes?”
Sometimes I feel like we are praying the rosary every night.