Like any good Unitarian I pick and choose what aspects of my husband’s Catholic faith to adopt. Honestly, I haven’t adopted much at all, but I’ve got to say that I really do love the Catholic concept of godparents. I like the idea of a kid having another set of adults who are looking out for him, and who he knows he can turn to when turning to his own parents isn’t appealing for whatever reason.

Admittedly and not surprisingly we don’t have the most traditional take on the role of godparents. As proof, here is part of email we wrote asking them to serve:

Now, I must admit that Andy is a little nervous about the influence you could potentially have on Flynn. “But they’re not Tigers fans,” he objected. “Can we make them convert first?” That flaw aside, you guys are good and cool people who we would like to be in Flynn’s life, and from what we can tell you’re just the right amount of Catholic to jive with how we plan to raise Flynn (read: not really Catholic at all). We envision godparents not as religious guides, but more just people who are involved in Flynn’s life though not technically related. I guess somewhat like N’s parents were to me, although obviously things will be different since we won’t necessarily be living so close. Still, we hope he’ll have adults to turn to for advice and stuff, especially during the phase when he will inevitiably decide that his parents are totally lame and awful people.

They accepted (and even promised to make the Tigers their official American League team), and so Flynn is lucky to have some pretty great godparents who even traveled three hours each way to get to spend a little time with him this past weekend, even though they’ll see him again soon once I’m back in the U.S. too and our whole family travels to visit them.

A little while back for Flynn’s first birthday, his godparents shipped him a few presents, one of which was a French language picture book. He wasn’t very interested in books at the time so we shelved it away. But since then he’s grown into quite the bibliophile and down from the shelf the book recently came.

“Am I mistranslating this?” Andy asked while reading through it for the first time. “This book is about some animal trying to figure out which other animal pooped on his head? And I’m really looking at illustrations of various types of animal poop?”

I examined the book for myself. “Yep, seems so.”

“Where in the world did we get this again?”

Of course, we got it from N and K. Not the most tradition of presents from not the most traditional of godparents, which is perfect because we hope Flynn won’t be the most traditional of guys.