The Truth

Having a three year old means that you have to be answering questions all the time. Lucas is a very curious kid, as as most kids his age he'll start asking question after question. I find this interesting because I can see how he is starting to grasp most of the concepts that we take for granted as adults but it is also exhausting. This morning he was sort of in turbo mode. Since we got in the car at home until we parked a the daycare he asked questions non-stop from "What Pokemon is bigger Charmeleon or Charizard?" to "Why is my hand shaped like a rectangle?" I have also made it more difficult to myself because of two choices I made.

The first one is that I want to answer every one of his questions as accurately as possible. We have taught Lucas to not accept an easy answer. If he asks you a question and your answer is "Just because" his immediate reply is "That is not a valid answer". I'm sometimes half paying attention at what he is asking and a "just because" will slip and he will always catch me. This is how I have sometimes found myself talking about the states of matter, atoms and the properties of light to explain why the sky is blue or talking about the nervous system to explain why his finger hurts. It is very rewarding when I'm in the middle of one of these explanations and he will ask a follow up question related to what I am actually saying. I know that he is not grasping absolutely everything I say but sometimes he will surprise me. His teacher the other day congratulated me because he knew what gravity was. What amazes me is that I explained gravity to him in Spanish, how he translated it and explained it to his teacher in English just baffles me.

The second difficulty is that I am not a very religious person so I lose the what I think would be a very useful cop out "Because God made it that way!". But I have also learned that he understands that sometimes I don't know all the answers, so he will sometimes accept an "I don't know". When this happens I make it a point to actually make my research so I can find an explanation for him. So his questions actually help me learn about stuff too.

Friday Movie
It is that time of the week again and here are the choices for the poll. Please vote on the top right corner under Jerry Seinfeld's head:

• A Touch of Zen: This has been called the best Kung-Fu movie ever, not just because of the visuals but also because of the artistic quality and story.
• The Paradine Case: I have seen every Alfred Hitchcock movie from 1938 until 1976 except for this one.
• Chimes at Midnight: Falstaff is a Shakespeare character in three different plays. In this movie Orson Welles creates a sort of biopic of the character across those three plays.
• Shall We Dance: A Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie. It would be the fourth most popular pairing of the two after the three I have already seen: Top Hat, Swing Time and Gay Divorcee
• The Revenge of Frankenstein: The second installment of the Hammer Frankenstein series starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.

What did I See?

Birdman of Alcatraz: You can see how some more recent prison movies like Shawshank Redemption and the Green Mile were inspired by this movie's tone. From what I read of the real Robert Stroud the movie was very kind to him by omitting most of his worst traits.