As usual, my son and I were chatting in the car yesterday on the ride home from school when he started asking about what the strongest thing on earth was.
While I won't try to recount to you the bizarre twists and turns this meandering conversation took (it would take a 5 year old of your own or a chemically altered state of consciousness to understand it), I will say that it somehow came to involve talk of wrecking balls and cranes, sharks (and whether they bite your skin off), elephants, fire, ants, and cheetahs.
"Strongest," it turns out, can mean myriad things (able to lift vs. capable of destruction, tough vs. mean, etc.), and it took a while for my son to decide what he meant by "strongest" -- and even then it was regularly subject to change. As one point in the conversation, though, he had settled on "strongest" essentially meaning "fastest," thus the cheetah.
In talking about the cheetah -- yes, we had a several-minute conversation about cheetahs -- we ended up at some point talking about a cheetah's prey.
He asked what an antelope was, to which I offered as much of a description as I could muster. He asked if he could see a picture of one, and I told him I'd find one for him.
"You have a picture of an antelope?" he asked eagerly.
Much to his chagrin, I told him, no, I'd find one for him on the Internet.
"Let's find a real antelope and take a picture," he suggested.
"Well, baby, we can't really do that. They live far away, on another continent called Africa," I replied.
"We can go on the weekend," he helpfully suggested.
"No, we can't," I replied. "It takes a really long time to get to Africa. We'd have to go on a plane and everything."
"Well, I can miss a day of school," he said.
"No, sweetie, you can't miss school to go to Africa to take a picture of an antelope."
"Oh, wait, I know. Spring break is next week. We can go then," he said excitedly, thrilled to have found the obvious solution to this conundrum on how to get the perfect antelope photo.
Between barely suppressed chuckles at his overt enthusiasm, I tried to explain that going to Africa was a big deal that would take a lot of time and a lot of money and it wasn't something we were going to do any time soon. It did little to ease his disappointment.
"But I want to see an antelope," he whined.
Though I'm not one to advocate more TV watching (heck, I don't even have cable at home), I think this boy could seriously benefit from some Animal Planet. Springing for cable's definitely going to save me in the long run over two round-trip tickets to Kenya.
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