A Hundred-Million Googles

This week at breakfast Ethan declared that an older brother of his friend L. had “a hundred-million Googles”. Translation: he had a lot of stuffed platypuses. How’s that? Well, Ethan named his Webkinz stuffed platypus Google (I don’t know why), and “a hundred-million” means a lot, so this boy has a lot of stuffed platypuses (go figure). I thought this was especially funny because the word google, before it became the name of an internet company, was coined (by a father who asked his child for a name – really) to mean the number one followed by a hundred zeros. So a hundred million googles is really just a one with a hundred and eight zeros after it. But the humor was lost when I tried to explain it to Ethan. He was far more interested in discussing the tooth fairy.

Ethan is a remarkably observant kid. His teacher mentioned last fall that he noticed if she changed a pair of earrings during the day, for example. Or the other day we were looking at a photo of some fencers in the local paper, and I said I thought they were high school students. “No,” he said, “See this one has a beard”. Sure enough, the caption said they were college students. Then, when we were trying to guess who was competing against whom, he noticed that two had their head gear on, and postulated they were the combatants – something I failed to notice.

Sometimes these powers of observation are a challenge for surprises. This week at breakfast he was speculating that the tooth fairy bought some of the cars she left for him at the local toy store (I took him to the store for the very first time a week ago – purposely avoiding it up until then as potential source of constant temptation – which has turned out to be). Anyway, I thought it was especially funny because the tooth fairy had indeed bought them there! Trying to stay one step ahead, however, I pointed out that the tooth fairy could have found them at another store too.

Ethan loves to speculate about the tooth fairy, Easter bunny, and Santa, and how they accomplish what they do. So far we can get away with Magic as the answer, but considering we’ve also told him on separate occasions that magic is pretend, it’s only a matter of time before he makes that inevitable cognitive leap. In the meantime, he makes guesses as to how fast the Easter bunny must move, how the tooth fairy gets into the house, and the other day he wanted to buy a plane ticket to go visit the North Pole to see Santa’s toys. When I told him no one had ever seen Santa’s toys there, we had a long discussion about why Santa would keep hidden: so no one would take the toys, so they’d be a surprise, because he’s shy, etc…