The Darndest Things
You never know what kids are going to say. Sometimes their thoughts unintentionally border on hilarity, and other times they show great wisdom. Two vignettes from my experiences with my boys last week...
**One of the boys got out of school early last Wed, so we hung out. As we were driving around we rolled into our neighborhood and he noticed something that didn't make sense to him. "Why are there so many check cashing stores on this block?" Great question. Something that I typically wouldn't expect a 9 year old to understand. The answer that I gave him was that it appeared a lot of people could make money with stores like that. Some day, however, he'll come to understand that you can legally gouge people with obscene interest rates in poor neighborhoods. If you are middle- or upper-class and you make a poor investment by buying a home with a variable interest rate, and the government will bail you out so that our economy doesn't go down the toilet. If you are poor, then they look the other way as you get buried under that 30% interest rate. When he comes to understand that, I hope he becomes an agent for change.
**On a lighter note, a couple of my boys were having a playful tussle in my backseat on the way home from a movie. One of them decided to up the trash talk with a threat.
Kid: If you don't stop messing with me, I'm going to smack you back to your mother's room.
Me: Uh. Bro. Don't you mean "mother's womb"?
Kid: What's a womb?
Technically, smacking you back to your mother's room would require a much harder smack than the one that would send you to your mother's womb, seeing as though the activity that causes you to appear in your mother's womb typically happens in your mother's room. Something tells me that he didn't understand all of the implications of his statement, however.
Fair Dinkum
**One of the boys got out of school early last Wed, so we hung out. As we were driving around we rolled into our neighborhood and he noticed something that didn't make sense to him. "Why are there so many check cashing stores on this block?" Great question. Something that I typically wouldn't expect a 9 year old to understand. The answer that I gave him was that it appeared a lot of people could make money with stores like that. Some day, however, he'll come to understand that you can legally gouge people with obscene interest rates in poor neighborhoods. If you are middle- or upper-class and you make a poor investment by buying a home with a variable interest rate, and the government will bail you out so that our economy doesn't go down the toilet. If you are poor, then they look the other way as you get buried under that 30% interest rate. When he comes to understand that, I hope he becomes an agent for change.
**On a lighter note, a couple of my boys were having a playful tussle in my backseat on the way home from a movie. One of them decided to up the trash talk with a threat.
Kid: If you don't stop messing with me, I'm going to smack you back to your mother's room.
Me: Uh. Bro. Don't you mean "mother's womb"?
Kid: What's a womb?
Technically, smacking you back to your mother's room would require a much harder smack than the one that would send you to your mother's womb, seeing as though the activity that causes you to appear in your mother's womb typically happens in your mother's room. Something tells me that he didn't understand all of the implications of his statement, however.
Fair Dinkum