Resurrecting the cartoon pigeon

I had a great time teaching the two little kids at church last night. We had fun looking at Da Vinci's Annunciation, and learning Luke 1:26-38 when Gabriel comes to tell Mary she will birth a boy and call Him Jesus. Boy 1 loved the Annunciation painting of Gabriel and Mary that Da Vinci did. He fell in love with it, looking lovingly at it for a long time, examining each part, noting Gabriel's wings, the landscape.... His pronouncement: "That guy sure is a good painter."

At the end of the lesson when they were coloring the workbook page with Mary and Gabriel in it, they noticed that two pigeons were huddled on Mary's house's windowsill. "Are they dead?" they asked. "I think they're just sitting there," I said.

Boy 2 said "No, one of them has an X on its wing. That means it's dead, like the fish in the cartoons with X's on their eyes." So then they focused on the dead pigeons, laughing as they colored and making up stories on why they died. Boy 1 stood up then and raised his hands and shouted "Pigeons, arise!"

We all fell over laughing.