I’m sorry, but can I just say, one more time, I don’t know, I don’t know, I DON’T KNOW! I’m sorry, Doodles, that your mother has such tremendous gaps in her very expensive education, but I simply don’t know any of the following (all inquired about before noon on a single day; this doesn’t include the forty questions I was able to give some sort of answer to):
–How the pee and poop slide out of the body beyond the fact that the bladder and bowels fill and then everything seems to find its way out.
–Who’s pitching for the Red Sox tonight.
–How mommies’ bodies make ming ming
–Why Moses died. I do know he’s not buried in the pyramid but I don’t know if he has a special tomb and how people find him if he’s not in a cemetery. Or why Moses taught the Jewish people about God.
–What science is.*
–What that is (when “that” is some random object being pointed at from the back seat of the car as we’re driving 40 miles per hour).
–Why dinosaurs roared.
–If lightening is squishy.
*Note when this question befuddled me, I called my father, who is a sciencephile. He gave Doodles a five-minute explanation, the gist of which was: “You know about the stars, right? And you know about dinosaurs, right? Well, science is when you take all the information you know about something and you organize it. You make connections between the things you know.”
Flashforward to that night at dinner.
Me: Did you talk to anybody today?
Doodles: To Peter!
Adam: You talked to Peter?
Doodles: Yeah.
Me: Did Peter explain what science is?
Doodles: Yeah.
Adam: So, what is science?
Doodles: It’s when you connect stars to dinosaurs.
How about tonight when I was trying to get him to finish playing and come inside to take a bath.
He told me:
“The longer you talk to me, the longer this is gonna take”
Um, oops. I wonder where he got that one from. Eek!