Toxic Floats!

 

“Mom got us root beer, for root beer floats,” Victoria told me, as I walked in the door from a long day at work.  “Elise and I both had one this afternoon.”

“Sounds tasty,” I said.

“It’s kind of weird though,” Victoria said.  “It isn’t the root beer that floats, it’s the ice cream.  Shouldn’t they be called ice cream floats?”

“That’s a good point,” I said.  I proceeded to look it up and found that in Mexico, it is called an “helado flotante,” meaning floating ice cream.  Clearly, Spanish speakers (at least in Mexico), know what they are doing when they describe things as complex as ice cream floating in soda.

“Can I have another one for supper?”  Elise asked, ready to skip whatever the main course was and jump to the good stuff.

“Now, Elise,” Anna put in quickly.  “Root beer is soda and soda isn’t healthy for you!”

“Why not?”  Elise asked, not believing that something that tasted so good was not also good for you.

“Because sodas are acidic,” Anna said firmly.  “And acid won’t let your stomach work right.”

“What sorts of things does your stomach work at?”  I asked curiously.  Mine never seems to do much other than complain if I eat Ghost Pepper Jack Cheese.

“Oh, digest things and stuff like that,” Anna said breezily.  I was disappointed, I had hoped I could use my stomach to make money, but it seemed like stomachs don’t do that sort of work.

“I thought your stomach had acid in it already,” Victoria put in.  “I don’t know why it would be bothered if you drank root beer, even if it is acidic.”

With this conversation behind us, we sat down to an excellent supper.  Afterward, Victoria and Elise watched as Anna took the two liter bottle of root beer out of the fridge and poured herself a cup of the “very unhealthy” liquid.  

“I thought that root beer wasn’t healthy,” Elise said.

“It isn’t,” Anna said.  “That’s why I’m only taking this much.”  She indicated a point slightly over halfway up her cup.

“That’s way more than I got,” Elise said firmly.  “I guess I’m more healthy than you!  I don’t drink NEAR as much root beer as you do Anna!”

Consistency is something that is really hard to achieve.  Parents often want their children to do what they tell them to do, rather than following the parents’ example.  Even the Pharisees in Jesus’ day struggled with this.  Despite them seeming like paragons of following the law, Jesus said of them, “So practice and obey whatever they tell you, but don’t follow their example. For they don’t practice what they teach.”

I think about this when it comes to instructing my children because they are awfully quick to pick up on areas where my actions simply do not line up with the things I’m telling them.  If I am asking them to love other people and speak kindly, but they hear me speaking critically of others or see me acting in an uncaring way, they will see the inconsistency.

For, if root beer is really as unhealthy as all that, big sisters would avoid it completely – not simply fill their glass with the toxic fluid “up to here.”