No movement. No talking. I think she’s asleep. Light as a feather, stiff as a board, I tried to gently levitate out of my daughter’s bed. I’ve almost crossed the threshold, the vision of quiet serenity in my immediate future.
“Dad?” My heart sinks, my knees buckle. “How do my eyes work?”
The moment of forfeiture leads to a half-assed answer that my daughter sees through immediately. “Um, your eye is like a camera that takes a billion pictures and then texts those to your brain. Your brain makes a movie, mostly of you terrorizing your sister.”
“Oh,” she murmurs as she realizes dad and the monkey at the zoo aren’t too many evolutionary moons apart. “How does my knee work?,” she questions as she flings her legs around like a cramped UFC fighter. After a poor attempt of explaining the concepts of joints and ligaments, I realize there’s no end in sight to this Jeopardy from Hell gameshow.
My mom recently sent me a study that showed a child can ask approximately 40,000 questions between the ages of 2-4. Further, some 4-year-olds drop up to 400 queries per day. Wow. I’m exhausted just reading this fact. I realized it was my mother’s subtle jab at my youth—I’m an admitted know-it-all with an obnoxious air of cockiness to boot.
Listen, I’m all about learning. And I don’t need to hear the sponge analogy one more time to understand the power of knowledge in the development of a child. But, seriously?! 40,000 deep breaths, eyebrow raises, fibs and flubs. It’s enough to make you think about inventing some kind of service that tells you any answer at any time—that has to be worth a googolplex of dollars.
Parenting experts out there suggest flipping the script on your kid. “Why do you think that this?” Nothing like dropping a little Socratic method on those munchkins! But I suppose the conversation is a good one, perhaps even giving you a chance to learn once in a while. Who would have known the human head weighs eight pounds without the kid from Jerry Maguire?! Maybe this is my chance to actually absorb the knowledge handed out in grade school without the embarrassment of fitting into those mini desks like Billy Madison. I’m fairly solid with shapes and the alphabet at this point, so I can probably coast through Kindergarten.
I’ll ask my daughters to wake me in fourth grade. Until then, enjoy these B.S. answers, kids!