On Mondays, well most Mondays, since I don’t work Sunday night I take Yoda to school.  It’s a great opportunity to catch up on our conversations.  This morning we started with a discussion about chemistry then we turned toward a more anthropological slant.  Here is but a snippet of the 30 minutes before we left for school:

Biscuits and Chocolate Milk:

Me: Ah, the wonder of chemistry. (Said while taking the biscuits out of the oven.)

Yoda: What’s chemistry?

Me: The mixing of things to make new or different things.  Like your chocolate milk, the chocolate and the milk mix to make a solution, but the milk stays milk and the chocolate stays chocolate.  But with the biscuits, we mix flour, salt, sugar, yeast, baking soda and water together then add heat to create something new.

Yoda: So its the baking soda that makes it rise?

Me: Partly.

Yoda: I love science.

Kittens:

Yoda: Why is Ruthie so wild?

Me: Kittens play wild and bite stuff to prepare them for hunting their food.

Yoda: You mean like rams and sheep and stuff?

Me: Well, I was thinking more of mice and rabbits, but okay.

Prehistoric Animals:

Yoda: You know they’ve found thousands of bones in the tar pits.

Me: Yep.  Big ones and little tiny ones.

Yoda: Even the mask of a short-faced bear.

Me: Yes, it’s really amazing what they have found in that asphalt.

Yoda: Sabertooth Cats (not Tigers), got stuck in the La Brea tar pits because they thought the buffalo and mammoths stuck in there would be easy prey.  Same goes for the grey wolf.  The gooey stuff isn’t like quicksand, you don’t sink, but you get stuck.

Me: (I’m thinking Tar Baby effect.)

Yoda: Sabertooth Cats hunted in packs so that they could take down large prey.  After all, they only weighed about 60-70 lbs so it took several of them to bring down a gigantic mammoth.  Their long teeth were only used to deliver the killing bite, you know to get all the blood and stuff.

Me: Yuck.

Modern Animals:

Yoda: A lion might could take an elephant, but an elephant’s trunk is hard and could knock the lion out with one swipe.  Lions like to hunt sheep and rams, but will take them away from the cheetahs in the area.

Me: Really?

Mummies:

Yoda: I know a lot about Egypt.

Me: You do?

Yoda: Yes, they make mummies.

Me: Like me and Momma?

Yoda: (Giggles) No, like the dead guys. They are covered in oil, salt and sugar then wrapped in toilet paper and they put them in a giant box. They even take their eyes out, but they still rot. If you left them in the giant box for say, oh, 18 years and then opened it up you would see that their eyes are taken out and that they may have a cut open head and stuff like that.  Sometimes the toilet paper gets all mushy and tears up and you see parts of them sticking out.  It just freaks me out.

Me: Does sound kind of freaky.

Yoda:Yeah, it just freaks me out.

Monday conversations, gotta love ‘em.