Snips and Snails and Sugar and Spice
I’ve known the poem about snips and snails and sugar and spice since I was a child. This is the version I learned:
What are little boys made of?
Snips and snails
And puppy dogs’ tails—
That’s what little boys are made of.
What are little girls made of?
Sugar and spice
And everything nice—
That’s what little girls are made of.
This is the version published in the early 1800s:
from The Baby’s Opera: A Book of Old Rhymes
with New Dresses by Walter Crane;
The Music by the Earliest Masters;
Engraved, & Printed in Colours
by Edmund Evans, Publisher: London & New York,
George Rutledge & Sons
My brother . . .
. . . and I illustrated the poem pretty well.
Before the third year of my family’s homeschooling journey, I wrote a list of 24 objectives for our children’s education. In addition to the objectives related to history, science, math, and the like were objectives such as these:
- Be faithful to Jesus.
- Be responsible adults.
- Have good character.
- Have personal holiness and purity.
- Know how to have fun.
One of those 24 objectives was this one:
Be uniquely God’s man or woman.
As a homeschooling mama, you have daily opportunities to train your sons to be God’s men and your daughters to be God’s women.
Be on the alert, stand firm in the faith,
act like men, be strong.
1 Corinthians 16:3
Charm is deceitful and beauty is vain,
But a woman who fears the Lord, she shall be praised.
Proverbs 31:30