Sunday, March 25, 2007

Trevor's Knowledge Base

Trevor knows more about dinosaurs, bugs and planets than me. He's learning these things at school. This is great, and despite my competitive nature when it comes to things like school, I am OK with him knowing more than me. Still, I don't like it when he asks me a question to which I simply don't know the answer.

So, last night, Tivo tuned the TV to the Discovery Channel. It had probably been watching Mythbusters or Dirty Jobs originally, but was still tuned to Discovery Channel when I turned it on around 7. As I continued to watch, a show about planets came on. Lucky me, I decided to watch to see what I could learn so that, maybe, I can answer a few questions.

But, then the boys came up and started talking and I couldn't really hear too much.

What I did hear, though, is that planets migrate, that Jupiter is huge, and that if Jupiter begins to migrate, the earth will be destroyed in one of two way: a death plunge into the sun or a direct hit by Jupiter. Jupiter is not all bad, though. Every now and then, meteors destined for earth hit Jupiter instead and save the earth.

When they talked about the death plunge into the sun, they showed a graphic. I was disturbed by this graphic. And, I couldn't stop myself from saying out loud, "that's a little frightening."

Trevor is a fearful child. I was a fearful child, so I know what it's like. I shouldn't have said anything about the death plunge. I feel pretty confident the death plunge or the Jupiter Smash won't happen for a few eons. Still, it's been 12 hours since we saw that show, and we've been asleep 8 of those hours, and my fearful Trevor has asked about three times, "why is it scary for the earth to hit the sun?" What's worse is my inability to smooth this over with some gentle lie. I try to gentle the truth, but that's the best I can do...

Tonight, the Discovery Channel is going to add fuel to mine and Trevor's fearful fires while we watch a show called Mammals vs. Dinos. I think an asteroid hitting earth will be featured.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You were a fearful little child with a lot of questions. We most always tried to answers them, but there were a lot that just did not get answered in a manner that made you stop asking the same questions over and over. Wonder where Trevor get it from....hummmmm
Love you all,
MOM