Questions Kids Ask

B.C. (Before Children) I thought I was smart.  I graduated Magna Cum Laude with a BBA and was my college's Outstanding General Business Graduate of the Year 1994 for heaven's sake.  I knew about statistics, marketing plans, production operations scheduling....etc.  Then....my children came along....with all of these QUESTIONS.  Questions that have sent me (and still are sending me) scrambling to my computer to ask the sage beings at Google for help!

Now don't get me wrong....some questions have been easy to answer.  For example, I can handle "How many legs does a camel have?".  I can even manage creative answers to questions like "How does the tooth fairy/Santa/Easter Bunny get into our house?" or "Do mermaids talk?".

My children have stumped me, though, with questions about nature.  They ask about things that I never learned in high school or college biology courses (or maybe I learned them and I just don't remember).  One day, at around 3 AM, my youngest daughter Madeleine approached my bed.  I squinted at her, still very much in sleep mode and asked her if she was okay.  She said yes.  She just had a question.  A question I would not have been able to answer even if I was awake..."Do bunnies growl?".  I really had never thought about that.  I didn't know. I promised to do a Google check in the morning.  Well, that morning, I did the search.  Couldn't find even a MENTION of bunnies growling...anywhere.  My husband came home that evening and she posed the question to him.  After an exhaustive search of pretty much the entire internet (we're talking MAJOR dedicated daddy moment) he found a You Tube video of a bunny growling!  Whoda thunk?  Other things I've learned from my girls' nature questions:  why the sky is blue, what thunder really is, why male butterflies are prettier than female butterflies, and the differences between alligators and crocodiles.  Thanks to their wonderful questions, they've helped me discover some really fabulous things about our world that I had neglected to notice before.

The most difficult questions my children have asked are the simple ones that require answers that could fill entire books (and have).  Questions like:  "Who made Us?", "How were we made?", and "Why do people die?".  Questions all humans ponder....we just don't linger too long on them unless we are in church or on our deathbed...or when those little curious faces look up to us for answers to their marvelous questions.