THE KING JAMES VERSION OF DINNER

Once you’ve fought as many mealtime “eat your food” battles as we have, you quickly learn that sometimes a hill of mashed potatoes is not worth dying for. When you’ve fought nearly all of those battles with the same child, and there are still two more incipient picky eaters in the family, mealtime survival becomes less a matter of convincing a kid to eat and more a matter of distracting yourself from what’s going on in front of you.

The other night, while our oldest was almost eating a taco, we decided to try the old “how was your day at school?” gambit. She loves to talk, so this seemed like a good way to keep the focus off the food. “Good,” she said, as she always says. The school could be taken over by a squad of Russian circus performers who spent the whole day squirting teachers and administrators with seltzer bottles, and that would still only qualify as “good.”

“How was Bible club?”

“Good.” *Ugh.* “But they kept using that one Bible with all the weird words in it.”

“The King James Version?” I asked.

“Yeah! Why is it like that?”

“Because it uses an old version of English.”

“I don’t like it.”

“You can’t tell the difference between ‘thine’ and ‘thee’ and ‘thou’?”

She giggled, and we were off. For the rest of the meal we spoke in Elizabethan English, or an unreasonable facsimile thereof.

“Please passeth the saltheth.”

“Yea, verily, she didst search for salt with which to beseason her flat-bread; yet she foundeth it not, whereupon she pleadeth that the salt be passed unto her; but it availeth not, for the salt sitteth at her right hand, where she sought it not.”

“May I be doneth?”

“And whither wouldst thou goest?”

“In the basement, to playeth with my dolleth.”

“Depart; be gone with thee; go thou now to the place down beneath, where thy play-things awaiteth thee.”

It was fun. And she finished her taco.