Anyone who knows my Summit knows that the kid says some crazy stuff and asks some crazy questions. He loves to pique our brains about dinosaurs, when they lived, and what happened when they disappeared from the earth. He's interested in plants and the sun and the moon and stars. He loves learning about how food gets on the table and where different meats and vegetables come from. It kind of freaked him out to know that we eat animals that we see in pastures, and I don't think he likes being a carnivore, knowing that he's eating someone else's mom or dad. To get him to eat chicken, I tell him it's dinosaur meat, and he seems to think that's kind of cool... until he remembers that dinosaurs are extinct... which brings up a whole new set of questions... like, "If dinosaurs are extinct, how can we eat them?" At times, this can be exhausting. Sometimes, I think he's just trying to get out of eating dinner so he can get to the candy.
Lately, he's been really interested in figuring out how he came to be. He's very intrigued by how he developed inside of me and how he was born. For a long time, he was convinced that I grew Ella and that Matt grew him, and he kept telling us that when Ella has babies, she'll have 3 girls, and when he has babies, he'll have 3 boys. I guess from a 3 or 4-year-old perspective, it would make sense that girls make girls and boys make boys. We corrected that idea with the example of Mercy Lou, how her daddy is a poodle and her mommy is a cocker spaniel. (Not surprisingly, he asked if a cocker spaniel is a dog? Ha! It is a funny name, but the question was pure Summit.)
After he understood that mommies grow babies in their tummies, he became especially intrigued with how he and Ella lived while they were in mine. He asked if they played and fought and got in trouble together in there. So, we explained that, no, they didn't play in utero... that he was there after Ella was born... and he started getting that, too. As I'm sure you can imagine, I didn't really wanna keep going down the road that we were headed... explaining the birth process to the kid... or how the daddy gets the mommy pregnant in the first place (though, I think he's got some idea, judging on what he used to make Ella's barbies do to him when he first discovered his "friend" that lived under his diaper).
Luckily, we haven't gotten to that point. Currently, he's stuck on the time he spent inside of me. Since he was about two, he's been afraid of going to sleep with the lights off. (This is a condition I attribute to his father: he was fine before Matt started leaving the light on for him until he was riding dinosaurs in lullaby land.) Anyways, a couple of days ago, he started asking about how bright it was when he was growing inside me. I told him he couldn't see anything, so he said, "Mommy, I wasn't afraid of the dark when I was in your tummy." And I agreed, "No, Summit, you weren't afraid." So, he waited a few minutes and said, "Then, I got scared of the dark after I came out." And, I was like, "Yeah, I guess so." (I didn't want to tell him how his father started making his carbon footprint unnecessarily larger.) And we left it at that.
Tonight, when I came home from teaching my first summer school class, Summit and Matt had a video to show me. It was about Summit's fear of the dark. You gotta see this. (I recommend pausing the song at the end of the page to hear what he's got to say.)
Clearly, the kid has gotten some signals crossed between how dinosaurs come out of eggs and how babies come out of mommies. I suppose I could try to explain the difference, but that's not a bridge I'm ready to cross just yet. So, I'll let him think he hatched. That's fine with me.
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