Having a conversation with a 5 year old over meat sauce and macaroni is pretty interesting. Somehow we started talking about how meat sauce looks like the crust of the earth, then we moved on to how macaroni resembles rocks and logs and sometimes funny looking animals. I was quite intrigued by her sense of how the earth looks and how it was created and how it was shaped, she knows quite well that the earth is round. As she went on to explain to mom and dad that while the earth might look flat, because we can see for long distances, the earth is actually round, and the reason it looks flat is because it's such a big ball that our eyes make it look flat.
So I started asking her questions about how she thinks the earth got here, and did she think that there may be other places that are like earth. She began to explain that, God made the earth, and she was pretty sure that He had made other balls, called planets, that looked like earth, but she wasn't exactly sure how many or if there were people on those balls.
Our conversation went on for a while about what the earth was made of, and how big it was, and why people could live on this "planet". Then she asked me if I knew what a planet was? I told her I thought I did, that when I was in school I was pretty sure that one of my teachers had explained that to me. So she told me that since it had been a "LONG" time since I was in school, that maybe she needed to explain it to me once more, so she did! "You see there are lots of other balls out in space, and they float around one big giant ball, the sun, and some of them are big and some are really small, and some (amazingly) are named after cartoon characters!" That's where she got me! Cartoon characters? I asked! She said "YES" cartoon characters! I asked which ones? and she told me Pluto, you know Mickey's dog? Ah! yes I didn't realize that. She said "Mom, there were so many of those balls out there, they just couldn't think of lots of names to name them, so they started having to use cartoon characters names". Well that made sense to me! So on we moved to why Pluto and not Goofy! She said it would be "im-mapro-priate" to name it Goofy, since that was a "funny" name and this was serious business! AH! again I was trumped by her knowledge!
So I started asking her questions about how she thinks the earth got here, and did she think that there may be other places that are like earth. She began to explain that, God made the earth, and she was pretty sure that He had made other balls, called planets, that looked like earth, but she wasn't exactly sure how many or if there were people on those balls.
Our conversation went on for a while about what the earth was made of, and how big it was, and why people could live on this "planet". Then she asked me if I knew what a planet was? I told her I thought I did, that when I was in school I was pretty sure that one of my teachers had explained that to me. So she told me that since it had been a "LONG" time since I was in school, that maybe she needed to explain it to me once more, so she did! "You see there are lots of other balls out in space, and they float around one big giant ball, the sun, and some of them are big and some are really small, and some (amazingly) are named after cartoon characters!" That's where she got me! Cartoon characters? I asked! She said "YES" cartoon characters! I asked which ones? and she told me Pluto, you know Mickey's dog? Ah! yes I didn't realize that. She said "Mom, there were so many of those balls out there, they just couldn't think of lots of names to name them, so they started having to use cartoon characters names". Well that made sense to me! So on we moved to why Pluto and not Goofy! She said it would be "im-mapro-priate" to name it Goofy, since that was a "funny" name and this was serious business! AH! again I was trumped by her knowledge!
Then the "piece de resistance" (with all of the French hyphens and dashes) was just how do we stay on this "earth" without floating into space. "Well, you see, God made something called gravity! And thank goodness He made it!" I asked why? "The gravity is what God uses to "stick" us on this earth, and it keeps us from floating out into space. If he hadn't made gravity then we might not be sitting here eating macaroni and meat sauce!"
So there you go! There are lots of balls out there that float around one big giant ball, and at least one of them is named after Mickey's dog, and there is something called "Gravity" that sticks us to our ball so we won't go floating off into space and not be able to sit around a dinner table and eat meat sauce and macaroni! It's very simple...and I love lessons from a 5 year old! They make my day!
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