birth of the nation

[flea]

mr. flea: Tomorrow we celebrate the birth of our nation.
Casper: How did it grow from being a little rock into a big country?
mr. flea: Um.
Casper: Did it grow inside someone's tummy?
mr. flea: Honey, birth can mean different things!

Comments

[dxmachina.livejournal.com]

When the fatherland and the mother country love each other very much...

[susanw.livejournal.com]

We had a similar conversation at our house:

Me: Friday is a holiday--it's Independence Day. That's like America's birthday.
Annabel: America? Will she have a cake?
Me: Remember? We've talked about this. America is the country we live in.
Annabel: We live in Seattle.
Me: The city of Seattle, in the state of Washington, in the country of America. You see, America used to belong to the British, and Independence Day is the day we became our own country.
Annabel: ....

Apparently her teacher talked about it too, because now Annabel is claiming Teacher Robyn insisted that they tell their parents to let them stay up past their bedtimes and go to the fireworks. Somehow I have a feeling it was more like, "Maybe some of your parents will let you stay up..." And it ain't likely to happen here tomorrow, since Dylan is laid low with food poisoning and I've got a cold. (Being sick on holidays is an important W. family tradition.

[susano.livejournal.com]

>How did it grow from being a little rock into a big country?

I think this is a very good question.

[calligrafiti.livejournal.com]

Bwah! Casper's hilarious.

[richtermom.livejournal.com]

I felt inspired to share some of the Independence story after watching a History Channel Revolutionary War program, so I told her about how taxes went, and how England had troops here, and how the King had his economic reasons for keeping America, and about the Tea Party, which she apparently knew about, and then I told her about the Declaration of Independence, and finally I told her about the War a bit, because that's what I was watching before she got up. I told her how since we were just starting to think about being our own country, we didn't have a lot of taxes to buy new uniforms, and we didn't have fancy barracks or good medical care (hm.) so our troops started out a bit less than intimidating even with George Washington leading them, and then some non-English speaker (Stueben) showed up and helped them get their butts in shape, and the French started helping us, and eventually we won. (The Steuben part stuck out to me because first off, he only spoke German, so he wrote down his lesson for tomorrow, and his aid would translate that to French, and then a French colonist would translate it to English. EAT THAT, English-as-the-national-language people. But also the junior high i would have gone to if my parents hadn't yanked us into a Catholic school would have been Steuben, also they pronounced it the way we do rather than the "usual" way. I often hear it pronounced "Stoooben", but we and the documentary pronounced it "Stoyben".)

At one point she was asking about how we learned about it, if people made movies or TV shows while it was happening, and I was like, sweetie, it was before TV, "Radio??" It was BEFORE RADIO.

So now she's fixated on how the Revolutionary War was *before radio*.

Baby steps. Auntie was a history major, so she just might get it.