More Unanswerable Questions

Last night, over goldfish, my son posed a couple more of his unanswerable questions. Except it turns out that this time, his questions have actual answers. And they ain’t pretty.

So the first thing he asked me was, "What happens if you eat fire?" I’ve never been to Vegas or the circus, but I know this thing can be done - or at least the illusion of this can be done (if you want to know more about the logistics you should check www.youcaneatfire.com). Before I could really give him a concrete answer, my son decided on his own, that eating fire would be way too hot and therefore probably impossible. But he carried that four year old logic all the way through and determined that if you ate something smaller, and therefore less hot, that definitely would be doable. "No you could not eat fire, so it would be TOO HOT" he told me "but you could probably eat a match stick." Looking past how impressed I am with my son (and my own parenting) that he knows that a match stick is essentially fire encapsulated (I mean he hasn’t even taken Safety Town yet!), I decided to investigate what actually happens if you do eat a match stick. I am assuming by the lack of information on the topic, ingesting one match isn’t going to do anyone much harm. But if you eat matches all the time, then that could lead to a serious situation. In fact there is an entire eating disorder based on the practice! As an alumna of a single-sex high school and a once active delta gamma sorority member, the news that there was an eating disorder I had never heard about was completely shocking. Its called pica and it turns out that people with pica just can’t help themselves around all sorts of "foods" completely void of nutrition - they eat matches, or rocks, or pencil erasers or even poop. And then I started to think about this and became alarmed, because this would indicate that entire groups of children (namely those between 12 and 36 months) are suffering from an eating disorder. Thankfully, a requirement for suffering from pica is that you can’t be a toddler, so poop eating is completely within the realm of normal for those kids. But if you’re not a toddler or dog and you do eat too many matches you can get something called hyperkalemia. I have to admit, that I don’t really know what happens here, but it seems pretty obvious that its must be life threatening and involve something similar to turning into a super-active battery. My son thinks that almost all food that isn’t white or made of shredded cheese is too hot for ingestion so I’m pretty sure he will not fall victim to pica of the match eating variety and die of hyperkalemia.

This morning, as I drove my son away from his Montessori preschool, he asked me "What happens when your hair is so long it touches the ground?" This made me smile immediately as I tried to figure out which hippie (child or adult) he had encountered during dismissal to inspire this question. We immediately discussed the most obvious ramifications of super long hair. It makes it tough to walk, because you might step on it, you would have to put it in a really high pony tail for gym class, you might accidentally poop on it or get it caught in your diaper if you were a baby, it would drag along the ground (by definition) and get stuff caught in it, it would get really muddy. And then we got to the good stuff, highlights of which included, there would be a good possibility that you would flush your own self down the toilet if it got caught in there by accident, and a squirrel would probably climb up it and ride around on your head (I’m not sure if this one makes super long hair an asset or not).

This is one of my favorite parts of parenting. Just listening to your kids explore hypothetical questions outside of the limits of maturity and reality. Its hilarious and endearing and heartbreaking (because you’ll watch them first gain and then lose this skill as they age) all at once. As my friend Lori says, its an awful lot like being stoned, without the sleepiness and the munchies.

By the way, while trying to figure out what would happen if you ate a match, I found out that you can actually make your own rocket out of a match stick. It’s just a guess, but I think that you could definitely hit a matchstick rocket with a bullet and if you did it wouldn’t do much of anything.