Conversations With My Daughter

The depth to which a conversation can go with my seven year old daughter must have been a whole chapter in the manual we are suppose to get when we become a parent - the one we never get. Always a patient soul, I have had to practice patience more with my daughter then any other living human being. The extent to which she talks will soon literally drive me nuts.

Question after question. I am ecstatic that my daughter craves knowledge. Wanting to know why grass is green, but not blue; and wondering why birds fly and people don't. The amount of questions she asks are what drowned me in a crazy river of question marks and my only way to stay afloat - find her answers.

With her thirst for knowledge, I now have the taste to find answers to all the thousands of questions she has asked. Why? Well there are two answers to that. One, I hope in some small way with answering her she will learn something new that will also continue to spark her interest, and two, she will finally be happy that she has an answer and move on. How does the saying go, "Killing two bird with one stone."

Finding the answers to her trove of questions of course led me on nights of surfing the Internet and a few evenings at the library. While my baby girl read Junie B. Jones books, I read everything with science in the title so that I could in some way answer my daughter intelligently. I mean, moms know everything, right? Boy, is that difficult to live up too. OK, let's face it, I work in numbers, 24/7. Why would I need to remember that grass is green because of chlorophyll? By the way, thanks Newton!

Her latest question is, "What happens when humans stop having babies and all the humans go away? Will this still be a human world?"

HELLO? Where does she get these questions from? How does a mom answer that question?

With a dumb look on my face, "Um, can I have a few days on that one?"

Thankfully, she obliged me and has granted me a few days for the answer. Sure, I could have come up with something, "Oh, when humans are all gone the plants will still be here." But, how boring is that? So, now my quest is to basically take that answer and spiffy it up.

The silence was wondrous today as no questions filled the air. Tomorrow, however, is a different story. There are definitely questions on the horizon because there is always silence before the storm.

This is an Original Deep South Moms Blog post. Dannie, mom of a 12 year old and a 7 year old, also blogs at her personal blog The Brunette Blog.