Alternate Version

Kids are so frackin' smart. I think my daughter is really, really bright, and I also know that all the kids I've ever met are super smart too. At the age of 4 (or "4 and a turd"), her brain is absolutely on fire!

I guess between birth and 3 is where they learn the most (I feel like I've heard that, or perhaps I'm making that up--either way, it's an impressive statistic, no?), and I heard on an episode of This American Life that around middle school, brain activity kind of levels off for a bit. It's not like they become dumb, it's just not the optimal time to be learning new things.

But back to Zora. She asked a really intelligent question question as we were laying in the dark together, me trying to get her to fall asleep (she does some of her best work during this time), then proceeded to give me an absolutely fantastic answer. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did:

We were laying there together, and suddenly Zora sat up and said "Mama, what about the people... well the person, the very first person? How did that person grow up without anyone to take care of her?"

Part of me wanted to squelch this, get her to go to sleep, and come back to it in the morning. But I know that's not how she operates. I replied, "Wow, that's a really big question. How do you think that worked?"

"I think that in the time of the dinosaurs, there was a dinosaur village, and they had a statue of a human. All of a sudden, there was a really big and powerful storm. It killed all the dinosaurs, and there were none left on the whole planet. But then the storm came down on the statue, and suddenly the statue became real. It was a girl, and she looked around and said 'What is all this?'

Then she decided to become a builder, like a construction worker. She decided to build a house. Every day she would go to the store and buy wood for her house. She worked very hard building this house, and she liked being a worker.

There was another big storm, and there was another statue in the old dinosaur village. That storm made the other statue alive. It was a papa. When he turned around and saw the storm, he was really scared. Then suddenly he saw the house. He ran to it, ran inside, slammed the door and locked it. When he turned around, he saw the worker girl. She said she wanted a baby. He took some seeds out of his pocket, then put them back in and said 'That will have to wait until tomorrow'.

The next day the papa gave the worker girl the seeds and she ate them. Then she had a baby growing in her. A couple of weeks later the baby came out. The baby was a little girl, and she grew up to be a construction worker too. "

Zora proceeded to weave the tale of an entire society of construction workers. The men didn't give birth to babies, but they would carry babies in a sling while they worked. It sounds like it took many generations to build, what I later found out, was a castle (like the castle we went to today for E's b-day party--The Museum of Flight! "Yes," I told her, "that was a lovely castle."). The workers would die, but their children and grandchildren would grow up and keep building.

At the end of all of this, I told her "Well this is quite an amazing hypothesis you had, and that was a lovely story!" To which, she replied "Well, I don't really know if it's true. I don't know if a storm can come down and turn a statue into something real"...