At the dinner table

"Merci," Miriam said.

"De rien," I answered.

"Gracias," Rachel said a few minutes later.

"De nada," I replied.

"America," Benjamin said.

We all looked at him and blinked.

"What?" I asked.

"America," he repeated, patiently yet expectantly.

Murmurs of confusion swirled around the table.

"Ugh!" he said, throwing up his arms in great frustration. "Washington, DC, guys! Come on!"

And when still no one caught on he added quietly, "But aren't we playing Name That Capitol?"

In his defense, we've been playing that game at the dinner table a lot recently so I can see how he thought that we were perhaps playing that came, what with the call-and-response format my exchanges with the girls had taken.

In our defense, weren't playing that game so we had every right to be confused.

We also had a rather confusing yet entertaining conversation about entomology vs etymology. I can't remember how it started but at some point in the conversation, Rachel said, "I had an Activity Days leader who was an entomologist. Oh—and my mom is an etymologist!"

"Phew," I said. "I was only one phoneme away from studying bugs! That was a close one!"

That was a perfect segue to a talk about the difference between eschatology and scatology.

"Scat is another word for poop so scatology is the study of, well, poop," Andrew explained.

"Poop!!" the kids shrieked. "Who studies poop?!"

"I actually did a scatology unit of sorts in grade three," I said. "We dissected owl pellets—owl poop—so we could see what the owl had eaten."

"Then what's eschatology?" the kids asked.

"It's an arm of religious studies focusing on end-of-life, apocalyptic scenarios," Andrew explained.

"Like...the zombie apocalypse?" Rachel suggested.

"Yeah, like ABCs for the Zombie Apocalypse!" Miriam said.

"Not that kind of apocalypse, necessarily..." Andrew said.

"Zombie a-pock-eclipse?" Benjamin asked. "I thought a pock-eclipse was when the moon goes in front of the sun..."

"That's just an eclipse," I said. "No zombies involved."