Saturday, June 02, 2007

Filling in the Blanks

Andrew has decided that he needs to understand everything. Right. Now. And that the source of all his answers is the Encyclopedia Jilltanica. I spend my entire day answering questions. "What happened, mommy?"
"Well, Andrew, the man walked by and he said "hi" to us."
"What did you say?"
"I said hi back."
"What did he say?".
"Nothing, he just kept walking."
"What did you say?"
"I said hi."
"What did he say?"
"He didn't say anything."
"WHAT did HE say, mommy?"
"Nothing Andrew."
"What did you say?"
"No more questions, Andrew."
This goes on all day long. Every thing that happens must be analyzed and discussed in the minutest possible detail. And repeated endlessly until Andrew has discovered every morsel of wisdom, truth, and knowledge from it.

Aside from the old "What happened, Mommy?" (by far his favorite question), he is also fond of simply adding prepositions so that I will fill in more details.

"Where are we going, mommy?"
"We are going to the store."
"With . . . "
"Aaron."
"To buy . . . "
"We are going to the store with Aaron to buy some groceries."
"So that . . . "
"So that there is food in the house for us to eat, Andrew."
"In the . . . "
"In the car."
"With . . . "
"Mommy and Andrew and Aaron are going in our green car to buy groceries so that we can bring them home and eat them. That is the end of the sentence, Andrew."

I used to always think it was heartless of moms to say, with exasperation, "NO MORE QUESTIONS." But now I think there is a time when you just can not answer anymore questions. I think I need to come up with an error report phrase, like "Failure to boot". or "I can not perform that function". and repeat it endlessly until the questioning stops.

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