This is one of my favorite parts of raising kids. They are full of questions, and if you are patient and thoughtful you can really blow their minds while enriching them at the same time.
And you never talk to kids, like they’re kids. You answer them, like You would an adult.
It’s why I want more kids. The questions are glorious.
My son asked me the other night before bed: “Dad, what did refrigerators in Texas look like?”
I could have laughed very hard, but from his point of view, it was hotter in Texas, and it was 30 years ago when I lived there.
I said “Well, refrigerator technology hasn’t really changed in a very, very, long time. They actually looked exactly the same as the refrigerator in the kitchen. But if I had to guess, you thought it may be different because it was long ago, and Texas was hotter right?”
“yeah!”
"Well, then that was a very smart question - you could notice a potential difference, and rather than assume, you asked. "
It’s so much fun raising these tiny intelligent beings. It’s like a home grown AI that isn’t artificial
No parenting class would ever have prepared me for having my kid ask me why we don’t need artificial oxygen storage, nor would it ever have crossed my mind that the right answer to that is “not on this planet.”
I know this is wholesome but you don’t need a parenting class for this, you just need to pay attention to elementary school
Me answering: well, phytoplankton make something like 65% of the oxygen we breathe so our air naturally is about 21% oxygen. The bad news is that over the last 150 years we have been emitting huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere which is making our oceans (where the phytoplankton live) more acidic. We know that the phytoplankton is less healthy in the acidic ocean and we’re not really sure how much more carbon the oceans can absorb before the phytoplankton really gets in trouble. Nevertheless, we are not really taking the carbon emission problem seriously because it would make the ultra wealthy slightly less wealthy, and they’re the only people that matter when it comes to public policy. So I am sorry you will probably have to experience 140F degree weather in the summer. At least as the amount of oxygen in the air decreases we’ll all get dumber, so maybe we won’t be able to comprehend the suffering we have caused.
My child to his mom: why is daddy always like this?
we are not really taking the carbon emission problem seriously because it would make the ultra wealthy slightly less wealthy, and they’re the only people that matter when it comes to public policy
We’re not a grass planet … we’re a ass planet.
Wait till she asks why Earth is classified as a death world.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeathWorld
A death world is one of the tropes in the “humans fuck yeah” or “humans are space orcs” types of sci-fi stories. It generally is a planet that other sapient organisms consider inhospitable to life. The elements, gravity, Flora, and fauna make it very difficult for anything sentient to evolve. But what do you know, Earth/Terra/Sol is such a a planet and humans exist here despite of the classification and all aliens underestimate humans for random reason of the week.
I can’t help but imagine her watching Spaceballs and then freaking out the next time she’s in a store and sees the Perrier water.
