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I have a son named Trenton who is five.

This means I spent an hour in the kitchen today explaining where we got our knives, why we use refrigerators, and why we don’t microwave nails (I’m a little worried about that one, but anyway).

As I made a pretty incredible spinach dip in the kitchen (for myself for lunch. I felt deliciously naughty about the whole thing), he asked when would we get a cow? to kill? and get milk?
“You don’t get milk from dead cows,” I said, “Milk comes from cows that are alive.”
“I KNOW,” he was a little annoyed that I didn’t understand him fully, “I just said WHEN are we getting meat from a cow and a cow for milk?”
“We’ll get our meat cow in a few months,” I said, “I don’t know when we’ll get a cow to milk. I’d love to have one.”
“Well,” his voice took on gusto, “All we need is a bucket! That’s all it takes.”
“A bucket?” I asked, smiling.
“Yep.”
“We DO need a bucket,” I said, “But we also need a little barn, and some really good hay. If you feed a milk cow yucky hay, you get yucky milk. And then you need a big thing called a strainer (I showed him how big with my educated arms), and a filter goes in the strainer to get all the dirt out… and then you need jars to keep the milk in. When you put the milk in the fridge some yellow-colored cream rises to the top, and you use it to make butter, so you need special tools to make the butter and then you can make cheese and yogurt… you just need all the tools.”
He blinked back. and then sighed a long sigh.
“If we could just get a bucket at da store…”
and then added as an after thought, “But we can never use my Kinex box. That would not be great, right Mom?”

Right, bud.
Riiiiight.
Whatever you say, Bucket head.

And now I’ll get back out there into the world of not only mothering, but answering every question he can think of.
“Who built this house?”
“But who OWNS it?”
“If Grandpa owns it, where did all the toys come from?”

He’s a stumper, that one.