Fortunately, we have lots of carrots

(c) 2008 Ms. Huis Herself at musenmutter.blogspot.com

In this guest post from Mr. Kluges, he shares a conversation he and Pumpkin had on Saturday night, before we went to a home builders/improvement/remodelling show on Sunday.

K: Ok, honey, you need to get to bed early today. You're sick and tomorrow is going to be a busy day. We're going to talk to people tomorrow who can fix our house.

P: Why?

K: Well, sweetie, our roof and our gutters need to be replaced.

P: Why?

K: They leak and they are letting water into parts of the house. We don't want that. If the wood in the house gets wet, it can get all eaten up.

P: What eats the wood?

K: If wood gets wet, then mold can grow on it.

P: How does the mold eat the wood?

K: One small piece of mold floats in the air until it lands on a wet piece of wood, then it says, "Yummy, wet wood. I'm going to make more mold." So then it eats the wood and makes baby mold. The baby mold grows up and sees wet wood and says the same thing, so it makes more mold, until finally the mold has eaten all the wood. But we're going to talk to some people tomorrow who can fix our house and keep the mold from eating the wood in the house.

P: Why?

K: Well, if we get the house fixed now it will be a lot cheaper than if we fix it later. It will be a lot more expensive to fix it later, and Daddy doesn't like it when things are expensive.

P: Why is it expensive?

K: It's expensive because not many people know how to fix Daddy's gutters. They are different from most other people's gutters, so the people that can fix them cost a little bit more money.

(Pause as she considers this)

K: You see, honey, it's kind of like the law of supply and demand.** There aren't many people who want to work on Daddy's kind of gutters, and the people who can fix Daddy's gutters can also work on other things. So the supply is low, but my need is high. That makes it expensive.

(She's quiet and still considering.)

K: Ok, honey, it's like this. What's your favorite food?

P: Carrots!

K: Great. What if you and me and Mommy all wanted a carrot, but we only had one carrot in the house?

P: We would die!

**Yeah, I laughed when Mr. Kluges was relating this to me. Sure, I'm all about exposing her to big concepts and all (see "east" conversation), but the law of supply and demand? Yeah, 3, even 3 1/2 might be a tad bit young for that one!