Rotten

I've been meaning to tell you all this for a couple weeks.
Our mornings are usually nothing more than poorly managed chaos. Usually we get to school just on time, but not without a little threatening, eye rolling, sometimes crying, and always hurrying along the way. Sometimes by the time I'm back home from school drop off, I'm exhausted and done with for the entire day. Some mornings are like that. You know you've had 'em if you have school-aged kids. Others are not so bad, and occasionally we have a good morning. Occasionally. Really.
As it is, we're lucky we get teeth brushed and shoes on before we're out the door, so some things get done in the car. Like breakfast. And morning prayer. We've got a little system worked out where we take turns saying morning prayer in the car on the way. (Alex wanted to know how I can drive while I'm praying. I had to tell him I keep my eyes opened when I drive and pray and that I thought it would be okay under those circumstances. Blew his mind.) It used to be that the kids would fight over whose turn it was. Lately, though, neither of them cares enough to fight. One morning about two weeks ago, I couldn't get Alex to take his turn. It had probably been one of those mornings. He wasn't budging, so after a few minutes, I asked Kylie to say it for him. She didn't really appreciate having to take up his slack, but she relented after only a minute. She calmly and clearly said her prayer. First she covered all the basics, and then she paused. I thought maybe she forgot what she was going to say, and all of a sudden she said, "And please help Alex not to be so rotten." And then she paused again. I thought she was done now, but she took a breath and said, very deliberately, ". . . for the rest of his life." And that was that. She ended her prayer in the usual way. I wasn't sure what to say, so I just said, "Uh, thanks Kylie, but I'm not so sure how kind that was." Right then I stopped at a red light and turned in my seat to look at her way in the back of the van. She just gave me kind of a half smile, but her eyes were saying it all. She knew she had me. The kid was being rotten, after all. What could I say. I dropped the little angel off at school, looked heavenward and just thought, "Yeah, what she said!"