This Shouldn't Have Been So Funny

I had a group of 3 and 4 year olds from the on-campus day care center today. When kids this age come, they often want to tell me about their pets or toys or something they had recently done. This group was no exception.

I have slides of the planets set up, and can turn them on individually until I get past Saturn. Uranus, Neptune and Pluto are all on one switch -- I turn all three on at once (when I set it up, I had basically run out of switches).

Uranus and Neptune are right next to each other -- basically like this:


When I got to this point one kid excitedly wanted to tell me something. "Ooh! OOooooh!" he was yelling.

"Is there something you wanted to tell me?" I asked.

"Yeah!" he said.

"What is it?"

"Those two planets...!" he started.

"Uranus and Neptune?" I pointed at them with my laser pointer.

"Yeah! I have balls like that!"

I almost wet myself.

He did go on to explain about his set of blue balls, but I had to hum a tune in my head to block it out, because my 8th grade sense of humor was rioting out of control.


I am a sick, sick person. But, really, it was funny, especially since it was so completely unexpected.

I had a camp group today. They are always tricky, because they bring vast age ranges. The kids today were between 5 and 13 years old. That is a HUGE range.

This group was actually quite good for a camp group. They shouted out questions on occasion, but they were appropriate and rare. And that's fine by me -- it can actually enhance the program.

After I showed some constellation pictures, one of the younger kids yelled out a question. It was kind of muffled, and had a kid accent, so what I heard him say was, "How goes the parables?"

"What was that?" I asked.

"How old are the animals?" he asked. Well, that was a little better of a question.

"Oh!" I felt relieved, "those constellation shapes have been around for thousands of years." I knew he'd be impressed.

"Nuh-uh," he said.

My brain started shuddering: Nuh-uh? NUH-UH? What do you mean 'Nuh-uh?!' How could this go wrong?? It was very simple... OK, brain, we can handle this. Let's work it out...

"Seriously!" I told him, "Most of those pictures were thought up by people a couple thousand years ago!"

"Oh," the kid said. "But how OLD are they?"

Kids. They will put me in a little white coat with straps on the sleeves.

"Thousands of years!" My voice had taken on a sad, whiny quality.

"Nope," the kid said, "cuz they'd be dead."

It is never good when the conversation turns to death. I thought I might get out of this now, though...

"Well, they're not real," I said. "They're just pretend pictures."

"They'd still be dead," he said.

"They're made up pictures. Like a dot-to-dot picture you draw! They're not alive," I felt proud at the comparison.

"So they're dead," he said confidently. OK, maybe I should have left off the 'they're not alive' part.

"Not really. They're not alive OR dead. They're just make-believe." MAKE-BELIEVE!! I'm pretty sure I haven't used that term in 25 years. I hoped that would be the end of it.

"So why are they in heaven? They must be dead," he said it quietly, with a tone that indicated reverence for the deceased.

The only worse that the conversation turning to death is when it turns to religion. And with all the evidence to the contrary, I do know when I'm beaten.

"I'm not quite sure," I said.

I hate it when I fail in a battle of wits with a 5 year-old.


Although I don't have much to compare it to: I don't know what it feels to WIN in a battle of wits with a 5 year-old. Someday.


Someday.