Those are some of the subjects I discussed with Sam today. Yes, I explained war to my almost five-year-old as he sat in the “way back” of the minivan.(I’m not sure whether to thank NPR or the president, but I really can’t listen to Dan Zanes all the time.)

I got to bellow it, because it’s a little hard to hear back there, and he kept asking me to repeat myself. Apparently I wasn’t making any sense, and it took him a little while to gather that he was understanding the words just fine, it’s the subject that doesn’t make any sense.

We also discussed why people fight wars with guns and not swords. I was blunt but simplistic–a group of one kind of people decide they don’t like another group of people so much that they have to kill them, and you can kill people from farther away with a gun than with a sword–and he thought about it for a bit, then pointed out that if you have a sword, and the other person has a gun, you’re going to have to duck.

I suggested that a better idea would be not to have a war at all, and he fervently agreed.

Then he asked me how the weather people knew what the weather was going to be like, and we got to move on to satelites, space, other planets, how the satelites get into space and further tests of my somewhat limited and definitely dated scientific knowledge.

We’re going to be buying If You Decide to Go to the Moon and The New Way Things Work for him and, I think, How Things Work: The Physics of Everyday Life for me.

I can’t even spell satellites!hotels accringtonringtone allenfor ringtone 100 five fightingringtones 50 cent shop candyringtone nokia 8390ringtone a920 samsung freerage machine against ringtoneal cell phone wilson ringtone Map