God Bless the USA

Remember how I said that Benjy was having a hard time figuring out if he was from Mexico or Oakwood, the apartment complex where we lived last year?  Well, I think we may have fixed that.  Ever since then we have been working on his identity crisis and trying to instill in him a sense of pride for his country.  The only problem is, I think we may have gone too far.

It all started the night we had a karaoke-style family sing-along to patriotic songs a few weeks back.  What you don't have those?  What's wrong with your family? 

We had already belted out America the Beautiful, The Star Spangled Banner, and Yankee Doodle when we moved on to the mother-of-all-crowd-pleasers God Bless the USA.  It was somewhere along the third round of the chorus that Benjy began to chime in.  When the song finished, he was beaming with patriotism.

"Again! Again!" he begged.  And we all sang it again until Benjy had every word memorized.

After that, he started singing it everywhere-- in the middle of class, in the car, in our backyard at the top of his lungs.  Everywhere.  It was like someone had flipped the switch on a singing Elmo doll.  He couldn't be silenced.

"Benjy, shut up," Jacob would demand. "We don't want the whole world to know we're Americans."

But Benjy didn't care.  He was "proud to be an American, where at least he knew he was free" to sing his new favorite song as loud as he could anywhere he wanted.  And that's just what he did, down every aisle of the grocery store today, while Andrew shook two bottles of vitamins to the beat.

So much for blending in.