Over the kids’ surprise weekend visit, I had a chance to spend some one-on-one time with eight-year-old Teddy.  Teddy takes after his mother (Kari), and talks nonstop.  Like his mother, he’s interesting, so this is ok and excuses the listener from the challenge of making small talk with a young child.  What always amazes me about Teddy is that first, his mind is always working; and second, it jumps all over the place in no particular order.  For example, when Ted watched Teddy one day when he was sick and couldn’t go to school, Teddy blurted out, “I just don’t get the Big Bang!  I mean, what started it?”  During the 30-45 minutes Teddy and I were together last weekend, some of the myriad of topics that came up for discussion in rapid order included the following:

* Birch bark can be used for paper, so if you would draw pictures of trees on pieces of birch bark and then put them together with pieces of wood for covers, you would have a book about trees made out of trees.

* I wonder if you can ever chew gum enough to make it disappear.  You know, like when you chew other food, it gets smaller and smaller and smaller and then you swallow it, but gum always stays the same.  (I mentioned this conversation to Katie and she told me there is a gum that dissolves.  She had it once and said it was awful.)

* What if we didn’t have skin?  What if everything about our bodies–the organs and the muscles and the blood vessels and everything was still the same, but we didn’t have any skin to hold everything together?  Maybe we would have something rubbery and we would all be like robots.  (Demonstration of how we would move like robots if this should occur.)

* What do you think would happen if you put ice cream in hot chocolate?

* I think more men than women died on the Titanic because they put women and children in the lifeboats first, so fewer women than men were left on the ship.

* Kittens were saved from the Titanic.  Really.  This is true.  A mother cat had kittens in a lifeboat and they were saved when the lifeboat was launched.

* Maybe I could write a story about a Titanic lifeboat.  “A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, a lifeboat sailed . . . ”

Kari told me later that Teddy had to research the Titanic for a school assignment, so that explains why the Titanic came up repeatedly.  As I said, conversation is interesting with Teddy.  You never know what he’s going to wonder about next.