The Big Questions

The "Why's" came slowly to our house.

Tizzy was a very active, not so verbal two year old, and for years we wondered if we'd missed the stage completely. But as you know, what your child skips in one stage, they'll make up for in another.

Now that he's six the questions have been flooding in and I have to admit, they've been fascinating.

The Standard:

• What was the first day of the earth?
• When the earth was molten lava what did they eat?
• Were you alive Millions and Millions of years ago?
• Were you alive in the Olden Days?
• What does it feel like when you die and where do you go?

And the not so Standard:

• Can a lightening bolt knock your teeth out?
• If the days of the week were alive, what would they look like?
• Why is cold invisible?

He walked into the kitchen the other day and said, " I was wondering if zippers were magical. When you pull your zipper slides up, it takes both sides of the zipper and slides it all together and that holds your clothes on. That seems pretty magical to me."

Another day we were sitting in the car and he started addressing reincarnation with me, a concept he'd been discussing with my mother. "Prisha says that when you die, your body falls apart, but you come back as a different body. I'm not sure if that's true, because Daddy's Mom died and I've never seen her, and Martin Luther King died and he hasn't come back yet either!"

Of course like any kid, he pulls out all the stops at bedtime. Last week we'd gotten him tucked into bed and answered multiple questions before putting our foot down and saying that any new questions would have to wait until morning. "Wait!" He called out urgently from his bedroom, "I have one more important question! How do children get inside their mother's bellies?!" He forgot to ask me again the next morning and instead waited until the moment we were about to enter Fairyland.

"Mom, you never told me how children get inside their mother's bellies."

While I'm all for answering questions as they come up, I was not going to get into details as we were entering a children's theme park.

"There's an egg inside the mother's belly," I said, " and when it gets fertilized the baby grows in there."

"Mom's have an egg in there belly?!" He laughed. " That's Aquarius!"

Zip has his own share of questions, but most of them pretty straight up and standard. However, being four, there are still some things that are completely over his head.

My favorite?

"What?! Darth Vader's a Bad Guy?!"