"Does God Eat Candy?"

As every parent has experienced, little kids ask a million questions about everything. The questions are often embarrassing, too, and spoken in their loudest voices within earshot of strangers. "Why can't I have purple eyes? Can I give you a movie star kiss, Mom? Do frogs pee? What's a tam-pon?" "Why does poop stink?"--this one asked by my friend Lauri's granddaughter in a bathroom stall. And of course, there's the big one: where do babies come from? I'm sure I lied the first couple times this one was posed to me. I would try to be patient with all these questions, answering to the best of my knowledge, even when whatever I said would just elicit another "Why?"
But now I find myself in a strange role reversal where I'm asking the questions and the girls are the (im)patient ones. On Sunday Katie and I were driving back to Eau Claire from my mom's, listening to Katie's choice of radio station. "Are Guns and Roses still together?" I asked. She gave me a weird look, and I know she was doing an internal eye roll: oh no, Mom's trying to be cool. "What's a Hollaback Girl?" was my next question. I had asked Erica that one before, but didn't remember what she said. "Who sings this song?" was asked multiple times. (Katie did question me once: who's more annoying, John Tesh or Ryan Seacrest? I say John Tesh, hands down. I'll take my music without a lecture, thank you.)
Katie gets annoyed watching movies with me because I always recognize an actor/actress but can't recall their names. "What else has he been in?" I'll inquire. "Mom, you ask that every time we watch this!!" Like, write it down!
On Facebook, I ask Erica "What is kefir?" when she writes that she drank a whole carton of it. She works for Sex Out Loud, the campus sexual health organization, and I might have questions about some of the stuff she writes in her weekly sex info column for the student newspaper, but do I really want the answers?
They have suffered through my struggles with technology: how do I text message? Can you show me how to take a picture with my phone? How do I change the ring tone? How do I get a picture from my Facebook album to be my profile picture? Can I put pictures on the computer without using a USB cord? How do I make the DVD player stop playing the movies in Spanish?
So now they know what it's like. Dealing with inquiring minds is not easy. If there comes a day years from now when I ask "Do frogs pee?" I hope they will smile at me kindly and come up with a satisfactory answer.