Tonight's dinner-table discussion (I had the night off, so I made basil, spaghetti and cherry tomatoes) went something like this:
--Rachel showed me the routine she made up called, "President Cheesebama, who is president of the Mozzarella States." She eats her spaghetti with mozzarella cheese and the routine (which she made up herself and Drew thinks is HILARIOUS, and he's right) starts with her placing three pieces of cheese at the top of her plate above the pile of spaghetti. The spaghetti, apparently, signifies a crowd. The two pieces of cheese at either end are Obama's security detail.
Then the crowd says something and one of the security guards starts to answer, and she stabs the cheese with her fork and puts it in her mouth. After it's in her tummy she says something along the lines of, "Hey! What's going on?" Then she does the same with the next security guard. And then it's Obama's turn. When they're all in her tummy, they start talking to each other. Really, you have to be there to see it.
--Then we started talking about "Downton Abbey" for some reason, and she made me explain most of the plot line of the series, which has been going for a couple of years now, so I had to talk about all the characters -- upstairs and downstairs -- and I could tell she was really following it. We talked about how it exemplifies a family in the midst of great historical change and how they handle it -- wars, the Great Depression, social structures falling apart, etc. "Everything was crumbling," I said, and that led us to...
--The Great Depression (she knew all about the stock market, although she laughed at herself for at first calling it the "Sock Market") and how people's lives were ruined. We told her that because of it, banks are better regulated and so her money is protected (earlier in the evening she had said that she doesn't buy things with her money that she just "wants," she buys them if she really, really wants or needs them. We praised her for her sound judgment). "So the Great Depression was a little bit good, in a way," she said. "Because inspired things came out of it, like better banks."
I held off on explaining the Glass-Steagall and Dodd-Frank acts. As Drew said: "I bet that most kids don't have these conversations with their parents." Indeed not.
Tuesday, July 28, 2015
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