Over the last couple of months, my bride Beall and I began to notice an abundance of unwittingly whacky comments coming from our youngest daughter. Here is how it normally works: Beall or I will be with Faith Evangeline Phillips (she is two and a half), when out of her mouth pops a comments so hilarious, we have to bite our tongue, run out of the room, and find or call the other. So we decided to start writing these down.

Here are a few:

Episode #1: Faith on Courtship
“Daddy, you have to find me a husband, but if you can’t, then you have to marry me, okay?”

Episode #2: Faith on Multi-generational Parenting
“When I get married I am going to have a million googleplex children, and also a couple of boys.”

Episode #3: Holy Communion and the Sheep
We practice weekly communion in our local church, so I am not surprised that our little ones take it to heart. What surprises me is the way the words they hear from us come out from their own mouths at the strangest times:

The other day when Faith was playing, we heard her say, “Sheep Mommy says to the Sheep baby: ‘Take this cup, and drink it in remembrance of me.’” Then she added, “God loves everybody in the family, especially the girls, but not lions.”

Episode #4: God is Everywhere
Beall writes: A couple of months ago, Faith and I were talking as I put her to bed about where God was. I said He was in the room, even with her in her bed. She said that He’d have to get out and sleep somewhere else. A few minutes later she told me He’d gone downstairs.

Episode #5: Spankings
About a month ago, Beall spanked Faith (she gets the most of any child I have ever seen) for some atrocity to which she responded: “I’m going to go upstairs and tell God that you spanked me!” Beall told her that it was actually God that had told her that she had to spank little Faith. She responded that then, she’d “go tell Jesus.”

Of course this little bit of disrespect merited another spanking and a dose of a theological discussion about who tells what to whom, and the glories of the Trinity, but that did not stop us from howling about it later in the night.

Episode #6: Dino-Girl
Readers of Doug’s Blog will note that the Phillips family is dinosaur obsessed. Sometimes this rubs off in strange ways. Recently Beall walked into the girls’ room and called out: “Where is Faith?”

A little girl in the room responded, “Faith isn’t here. I’m a pterodactyl!” With that she pulled some dino-bird-like fabric over her head.

From Doug’s Bookshelf: Last year we republished the nineteenth century classic Little Faith. This is a heartwarming morality story about a little girl who learns the true meaning of her name. A beautiful story of devotion between father and daughter. This reproduction of this hardback classic was dedicated to — you guessed it — my daughter. Available on this Web site.