Whales Eat People. All the Time.

Ever feel like you've had the same conversation over and over?  I feel that way sometimes, mostly because I do have the same conversations over and over.  The top hits include:
Audrey's Hitting Me.
I Have to Go Potty.
I Need to Have Chocolate for Lunch.
The Cat Doesn't Like Me.

Then, there are new conversations that go in and out of style:
Why Are The Pigs Laughing at the Angry Birds?
Santa Claus is Not Coming to My House Today.  (sad face)
I Need to Put on My Iron Man Shirt and Fight the Bad Man on This Movie.

For the most part, I can see these coming.  They're situation-dependent and many of them happen like clockwork.  I do get excited when a new conversation starts like...

"Mom, why do whales eat people?"

Whaaaaaaah?

Do you have any idea how hard it is to get to the context of that question?  He's three.  We don't have a whale in our house, we haven't talked about Jonah, and the only time I could think of him seeing a whale is Finding Nemo.  Of course, the whale does eat the fish and keep them in his mouth until he blows them out to Sydney.  It's traumatic: I have to hold Sebastian's hand from the moment Dory and Marlin get off the East Australian Current.

As I tried to assure him that whales do not eat people, Sebastian presented all kinds of evidence.  First, our new movie The Pirates, where a pirate makes his grand entrance in the belly of a whale.  Then, there's Pinocchio, which Sebastian has only recently watched all the way through.  A little boy on the playground was singing a Veggie Tales song about Jonah.  Now, just when I figured I was safe, Sebastian finds a new PBS Kids show on the iPad where a little boy named Noah and his dad or grandfather get eaten by a whale on a fishing trip. 

Seriously?

I got nothing.  I'm ready for all kinds of conversations.  Bizarre conversations.  Like "I can't find my pizza and green beans under the covers of your bed" conversations.  These can be addressed inside the confines of my house or can be easily addressed in a single word or phrase that helps the world make sense.  The whales eating people thing is such a great plot point in children's stories that every time I try to fight it with evidence, I just get shot down.

I'll tell you, as excited as I was to have a new conversation the first time, we discussed whales eating people for the last week and FOUR TIMES BEFORE LUNCH TODAY.  And the kid wants answers.  None of this namby pamby "it doesn't happen" or "they're just being silly" or "whales eat krill like on Finding Nemo" junk.  Because Sebastian has seen it with his own eyes in three different cartoons and even Dory was proven wrong about the krill thing the moment a clownfish and a Regal Tang (if you ever wondered what Dory was) got sucked past a blue whale baleen.

Now, there are many things people do to mess up their kids for the future.  In my experience, you need to make note of these things as you go so you can ease the child into normal life later.  That's part of the reason I keep a parenting blog - to help me remember what I need to go back and fix before the kid asks a dumb question in Biology class.

So yes.  Whales eat people.  All the time.  It's a very common occurrence.  But the people are fine afterwards.  They make a grand entrance, find their sons, and get back to fishing - even get more fishing done after everything they learned from the whale.

Now I'll go tell my kid that probably three more times today, and tomorrow, and the next day until he wants to get back to a point with a more immediately addressable hypothesis (see The Cat Doesn't Like Me).  Then we'll discuss the relative merits of chocolate for breakfast and how to make a cat stop running away from you.  Then we'll find something completely different from some other random source.

And at the end of this, with my smug little smile on my face, I'll probably get eaten by a whale.  If you read about it, remember it's not a biological anomaly: it's a higher power teaching my child about Karma.