Sunday, February 20, 2005

With Apologies to Professor B.

So I'm in bed trying desperately for a nap, which seems to release some sort of chemical signal to the kid to descend upon me with toys, chipper questions, new songs to sing, and demands for food, drink, and attention...

I try to ignore her. She begins wreaking havoc upon me with the toys. The unicorn, AKA Dazzletail Rosary Jane, is thrust into my face. "She is eating your nose," the kid informs me. "She is nibbling it."

"She is not," I reply. "Unicorns do not have teeth."

The kid is taken aback. She examines the unicorn in question, one of those excruciatingly girly ones, a pearly white and pink-rosebuds and gold and lace sort. "Of course they have teeth," she says, not certain.

"No, they don't."

"But --"

"Do unicorns exist? Really?"

"No," she allows.

"Therefore, do their teeth exist?"

"No," she says.

"If their teeth don't exist, can unicorns have teeth?" I demand.

She frowns. "No," she says, slowly.

"All right, then," I say, and turn over in the bed.

She studies her unicorn a moment, looking for the flaw in my logic. Then she climbs over me and says, "But I can imagine a unicorn. And I can imagine its teeth. And if I can imagine its teeth then it has teeth."

She's figured out Plato's Realm of Ideas. At six.

I'm pretty impressed.

Unicorns do not exist
I never said they do
Unicorns do not exist
They've better things to do

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Entertaining... that is a pretty cute thing for a kid to say.

Anonymous said...

Out of interest, whence did you purloin that little quatrain at the end? Quote . . . Unquote would like to know.