A story that's not really about snakes, but sort of.

So. . . today at church I am the substitute singing time lady. i do my thing for jr. primary. then as they are dismissing the kids to their classes, they realize they are like 3 teachers short (by the way, this is very normal). they ask me to go sit with the 4 turning five year old kids until they round up a teacher for them. so i go sit at this tiny table made for rats, and start hanging out with the kids. there's five of them and a really cute one i've never seen before. i shoot the breeze with the kids asking them what they like about summer, what their favorite animal is and what is up in the life of a four year old. i then ask the one i've never seen before what his name is, and if he's new. we'll say he say's his name is "neal". neal tells me that he moved on saturday. from nauvoo, IL. and there's a big river there. i concur with neal about the general "bigness" of the river. neal said he moved to lovely kentucky because of his dad's job. and what does neal's dad do for work you ask? make dentures. for some reason i thought that was funny; maybe because of the large number of people i have seen sans teeth. after sitting there for ten or fifteen minutes and wondering how i supposed to teach a class and be the singing lady for sr. primary at the same time, the kids got restless, apparently tired of mine and neal's conversation about dentures. lame. i remembered a time at preschool when sara, amy and i were trying desperately to kill time while waiting for something- probably music time or the stupid playground. we decided that since we had thirty 3,4,5 and 6 year old children all waiting and about to rise up and revolt, we would tell stories. about snakes. strangely enough, they shut up (mostly) and listened to our weird snake stories. i'm pretty sure we kept them quiet for about 20 minutes. magic through our words i tell you. so i started to tell these goobers a story about a treehouse. their eyes got big and i could tell i had them. and just when i got to the good part-- their real teacher came. they'll never even know how it ended. until next time i'm there. which will probably be next week.