I worked for a large reptile wholesaler for a time.  This particular wholesaler had a fondness for very large pythons.  There were several gargantuan Burmese pythons at this place.  Female Burmese pythons can get really, really huge–20 foot plus huge and wider around than a truck tire.  While they are mellow snakes not prone to biting (Thank God), that huge body is controlled by a tiny little brain.  As a result, any time we would go to feed the Burmese, it would require two people.  One person to feed, one to “spot”.  The spotter’s job was to get the snake off you should it mistake you for its dinner. 

Now the Burmese, they ate pigs.  Yeah, pigs.  Small pigs, but still, PIGS.  One warm summer day, I got to work and was greeted by the nastiest smell in the universe.  The large female Burm had upchucked her pig.  I had to clean it as the other employee was incapacitated by repeated bouts of his own barfing (poor guy).  So yeah, it was as gross as you can imagine.

Fast forward four years and I have a kid.  For those of you who don’t have children, let me describe some of the things that will get on other things with a small child around.  They will piss on the floor.  They will barf on the sofa, the car, your bed.  They will wipe boogers on the walls.  They are friggin gross.  However, because of my prior experience and survival of cleaning up huge snake vomit, I was inured to this aspect of child rearing.  So there’s a silver lining to snake barf.

My 6 year old lost her first tooth today prompting her to ask this question:

“Is there any scientific proof the Tooth Fairy exists or is it just the parents?”

She hasn’t asked about Santa yet, but I’m sure it’s coming.

I answer about 1500 of them a day.  Out of those, around 1000 require me to make a decision of some mundane type–”Mom, can I have a popsicle? Mom, can I, can I, can I”.  It can be really exhausting.  However, the other questions–the ones that don’t require a decision but instead an explination–are one of my favorite parts of parenting because when your kid asks you about something in the world, you can answer however you want! Or as Homer says “Kids are great, you can teach them to hate the things you hate”. My answers are always based in science, always. I think about everything in a critical, scientific way–there are no exceptions, no subject exempt from this. 

My daughter’s questions range from the amusing:

-Do spiders have families?

-Can frogs drive?

-Why are trees green? (Never ask someone trained in biogeochemistry this question, the answer is 10 minutes long)

-Why is a there a pyramid on the one dollar bill?

To the heavily extistential, theological or epistemological :

-Is there a hell? (she saw it on the Simpsons episode where Homer steals cable)

-What does our cat think about?

-What happens after you die?

-When will I die?

-Where did we come from? (this required a clarification I wasn’t sure if she was asking where babies came from or people in general–it was the latter.  Another 10 minute explination).

When you take nothing for granted in the world, you come up with some really interesting questions.  What freaks me out sometimes however, is thinking about how other people might answer their kid’s questions–if they say “don’t ask”, “who cares”, or worse “that’s a stupid question”.  There is no such thing if you are forming your framework about reality.

Many of the questions my daughter asks are at heart, questions about science, most of which I can answer or explain correctly, but a few (like, why don’t we name black holes?) I have to look up.   You don’t need graduate training in science to raise a toddler but considering the questions she asks, it sure helps.

A sampling of the things my 5 year old said this weekend:

Daughter: “Mom can you stuff someone down a toilet?

Me: No honey

Daughter: “what if you cut them up?”

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Daughter: “What happens if you shoot someone?”

Me: “You go to jail”

Daughter: “What happens if you stab someone”

Me: “You go to jail”  I turn around and look at her,

       “Why are you asking?”

She hasn’t watched any violent TV so I don’t know where it’s coming from, but it’s a little freaky.  

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At the dinner table on Mother’s Day with my husband’s extended family including his 90 year old grandmother

“Daddy, is Fuck a bad word?”

Then later in the bathroom to me: “Mom, why is fuck a bad word?, why is any word bad?”  Which prompted an interesting discussion about why some words are bad and some aren’t.

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And an amusing exchange:

“Mom can I pick out my own clothes?”

“Yes, within reason”

“As long as they’re not tacky right?”

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And more from today:

NPR had a bit about people putting isolated musical pieces (like a bass line or drum line) on the internet and strangers adding thier own selections (like vocals) to create songs.  I thought that was pretty neat.  So I commented to my daughter,

“Wow, you are so lucky to be born now, the technology you’re going to have is going to be amazing”

to which she replied

“I want a gecko”.

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I was talking to her about how my best friend had the nicest dog growing up:

Daughter: “What happened to her?”

Me: “She died honey”

Daughter: “Why?”

Me: “She just got old”

Daughter: “If I had the corpse I might be able to do something about that”.

No more Scooby Doo for her!

 

You know the illustrative myth of Sisyphus?  Condemned to roll a boulder up a hill in hell which tumbles back to the bottom right before he reaches the top every time? It’s about futility, but let me tell you that Greek dude has nothing on parents of toddlers.  It’s impossible to clean a house containing one.  I can’t ever seem to get over the crap I find in the strangest places.  I can’t even count how many times I’ve wondered: Why the hell am I cleaning this here?  What is the reason for this?  Then I clean it and it’s dirty again 2 seconds later, Oh the Futility!

Both my husband and I were recently very sick but our daughter was fine and dandy.  Very quickly things devolved into complete entropy, the house became almost borderline filthy, like Department of Child Affairs filthy, because neither of us could clean but our daughter could go on creating one mess after another.  I remember having very bitter thoughts about my super nice neighbors–a couple who do not have children–thinking when they clean shit, it actually stays clean, even if they are sick!!!  What a concept.  On the other hand, I also believe you cannot truly appreciate having a clean house in the future, say the someday when my daughter moves out (and/or cleans up after herself which she already does to some extent) until you have experienced the futility of cleaning in its truest form: cleaning a house with a toddler in it.  At least I can look forward to knowing I can truly appreciate something like that which would probably never occur to childless people.  The lucky bastards.

My 5 year old daughter: Dawdling around and not getting into the car which was parked in a space adjacent to a large sewer opening.

My husband, running out of patience trying to get her into car (in a quiet voice so I could hear him over the top of the car but my daughter could not):

“Get in the car or the sewer clown will eat you”.

 

You know you have kids when you go into their bathroom to clean because Grandma’s coming over for the weekend and find this kind of shit: an Angelina Ballerina playing card smeared with toothpaste and shoved under the baseboard behind the toilet.

Now, I can’t really point fingers (although I showed it to her and asked her not to do it again) because when I was a kid I distinctly remember conducting similar messy and I’m sure infuriating science experiments.  I took this one calmly because I figure it’s karmic retribution for the time I froze a banana when I was 7 and threw it against the wall of our living room to see what would happen (testing the properties of matter).  Predictably, it made a large hole in the drywall which I blamed on my teenage, perpetually pissed-off brother; I got away with it then so I have to pay for it now.  I know one of my husband’s childhood science experiments was in physics–specifically gravity and trajectories: He threw a rock up in the air and then moved to watch it come down–it came down on his head, creating a huge dent that’s still there today.

What I am NOT looking forward to, is the universal justice for the time when I was a teenager and two friends and I drove a Ford Bronco onto a very large swath of lawn in the front yard of the house of a boy who had jilted my friend (the driver).  We put the car in neutral, hit the gas, and left a 50 foot, double furrow in the turf.

I know I’m going to pay for that one eventually.

Wendy’s has a new line of toys for their kids’ meals.  The toys and informational booklets come from National Geographic Kids.  And while I sincerely appreciate Wendy’s attempt to inject education into their fried food, I think they might want to reconsider some of the specifics.

One toy in particular stands out.  It is a small, plastic, detailed and relatively clever replication of an Egyptian sarcophagus—containing a mummy buried in sand—listed on the website as an “Egyptian Sand Toy”.  The promotional copy is as follows: “Uncover the mystery of the tomb.  Locate the secret button to reveal an Egyptian mummy hidden under the sand.  This tomb is just like the ones used by Kings in Egypt thousands of years ago!”. 

I was over at a neighbor’s house and her daughter held up this toy from her Wendy’s kids’ meal and the following conversation ensued:

Neighbor’s 4 year old: “Look!”

Me: “Oh, yeah, it’s a sarcophagus!”

Neighbor’s 4 year old: “No it’s not, it’s a mummy box!”

Me: “That’s what sarcophagus means honey, what a perfect description”.

Neighbor: “Yeah, I don’t know if I like the fact that Wendy’s is giving out toys that force me to have a lengthy discussion about death over dinner”.

Me: *hysterical laughter*

My daughter is obsessed with the idea of alien life. She started off obsessed with the solar system when she was 2-3 or so; we took her to the planetarium and saw a show about the universe.  After that it was endless rounds of questions on the topic of astrophysics, most of which I knew but some I had to look up.  We spent time discussing how all elements in the universe, including those inside our bodies right now, were create by supernovae–we are all children of the stars to be romantic about it.

From there it moved on– I’m not sure exactly how–other than my husband and I spend a lot of time discussing this subject and subjects about space in general–she started asking if aliens were real (I think Scooby-Doo probably also had something to do with it).  And when I explained to her what we know about life in the universe: the commonality of the building blocks of life, the existence of life on Earth even in the harshest conditions, the size of the universe and the likelihood of other planets hospitable to life, she asked, “Where are they?”, which is of course, Fermi’s Paradox.

This is what happens when two geeks breed.

Mentally, it’s difficult for children to distinguish between fantasy and reality for years after they are born (at least they have the excuse of immature brain development, unfortunately this excuse wears thin for adults), but I imagine with the computer graphics we have these days, it’s a whole hell of a lot harder than it used to be.

My daughter and I frequently watch animal shows; the weirder the animals are, the more I like them.  We have watched numerous shows about deep sea life and all the bizarro creepy crawlies down in the dark, we watch countless shows on bizarre bugs, and have a large collection of bug books featuring creatures seemingly evolved as a bad joke.  On my coffee table I have a large book dedicated to animals who go all out for camouflage, each one a more extravagant assemblage than the last.

Recently we were watching one of the “The Most Xtreme” animal shows–this time “The Most” being “Best of the Bizarre”. The show included the platypus, naked mole rats, and others of similar ilk, and one in particular caught my daughter’s attention: the deep sea angler fish. Deep sea angler fish have one of the most bizarre reproductive strategies in the entire world: Male angler fish are about 1/50th the size of females, and when they find a female in the long, cold, dark, they attach themselves and never let go (although to anyone who’s had a super clingy ex this may come as no surprise).

Eventually, the male almost disappears entirely into the female’s body (I could make a joke here but won’t); their head disappears, they form a cooperative blood supply, and they look like they are some type of parasite or nasty case of the deep down warts–which scientists assumed for a long time they were until they figured out the truth.  After this section, for some inexplicable reason, there was a section on mermaids.  I didn’t pay close enough attention to see what parallel the show made between the bizarre but true and the bizarre but bullshit, but it confused my daughter.

Right after the show we were just about to eat dinner and I was busy prepping stuff.  My daughter was saying something about how strange the angler fish was; I was only half listening and distractedly commented,

“Yes, honey, the world is full of strange and wondrous things..” To which my daughter replied with the half question, half statement,

“But not mermaids”.