Jesus was once a 3-year-old. That’s what I used to tell myself when Frank was 3, and would bang his Thomas trains on the pews at church, and then wail if I took them away. Now I wonder why I ever let him bring them into the church in the first place. Probably because I didn’t want to set off that wail on the way to Mass. What I was really telling myself was to have patience. What he was doing was distracting, sure, and probably annoying the other people, and needed to be corrected. But it wasn’t any kind of evil or sinfulness. It was just being 3, and having a lot to learn about how to behave in the world. So the idea of Jesus being 3, and having all the human attributes of a 3-year-old, puts me in mind of Mary reminding him to sit still while he ate, or not to interrupt when Joseph was talking. Now that Teresa is 3, that thought is coming back, mostly when I don’t want to answer one more question. “Where are you going?” “I’m going to take the dog out.” “I coming. Where are we going?” “To take the dog out.” “Where?” “On the sidewalk, to the front of the house to get the mail, and then back to the back door.” “Why?” “Are we going by the haircut place?” “Are we going to see the clown from McDonald’s?” This on the day she has developed a sudden fear of Ronald McDonald, and thinks that he is going to come through the gate into the backyard and somehow look in her window. Never mind that it’s a skylight, and, as Caroline pointed out, if that did happen, it would be really creepy. “No, we’re not going by the haircut place, that’s the other end of the block. And no, we won’t see the clown from McDonald’s,” I answer, really hoping that someone dressed as a clown doesn’t, by some quirk of coincidence, choose that moment to walk down our street. The thing is, as much as I just want to take the dog out and get the mail and get on with my day, she really wants to know the answers to her questions. They might be obvious to me — why would we go all the way to the other end of the block if we just want our mail? — but not to her, and she’s just trying to make sense of everything. A burgeoning imagination is telling her all sorts of odd things could happen; she wants to know which of them are likely to. I don’t know, maybe Jesus didn’t have those kinds of questions. But if he was a human 3- year-old, which Scripture tells me he was, like us in all things but sin, I’m sure there was some curiosity there. And I’m sure Mary had plenty of opportunities to practice patience.