Cal had his swimming lesson tonight, and I figured out very quickly after having taken three steps into the house when I returned from work that I was the lucky parent who would be taking him. "Mommy, I'm ready to go to swimming now!" a shoed Cal exclaimed as he frantically scrambled to grab his coat and put it on. Dan was sitting on the couch manning his laptop, and Ella was rolling around on the Pooh plane. Cal's swimming bag was packed and sitting on an end table in the family room. I guess he is ready, I thought. Looks like I am taking him.
I'm not complaining -- I enjoy taking Cal to swimming. He's made so much progress since his first couple of lessons (see Cal's Second Swimming Lesson), and it's fun to watch him swim so confidently now. Plus, Dan could get Ella into bed -- I wouldn't need to deal with her incessant bedtime chatter that's always the same and becoming really annoying. "Turn the light on. Turn the fan on. Don't close the door. If I cry or yell, you'll close the door. Don't close your door. Go downstairs." Dan's so much better at shutting that down than I am.
So as quickly as I had gotten home from work, Cal and I were heading to his swimming lesson. It would take 10 minutes to get there so there'd be 10 minutes of conversation that would surely hit on the topic of weather.
Cal did not disappoint. In fact, he got the ball rolling as I buckled him into his seat when he declared that the clouds in the sky this evening were stratus clouds and that he knows more about clouds than I do. He may be right, I thought. "How do you figure that?" I decided to ask.
"Because I do," he answered.
"Yeah, but what makes you think you know more about clouds than I do?" I wanted him to think about it.
"Mommy, those aren't nimbostratus clouds because it's not a strong rain," he declared.
"Yes they are," I insisted.
"No they're not," he wouldn't back down. Hmm... I do remember reading something yesterday about stratus or alto-stratus clouds sometimes producing a light rain, I thought.
"You might be right about that, Baby Bear," I responded. It wasn't something we could confirm with our novice knowledge since it was already dark outside.
By now, we were on our way to swimming; but we weren't talking about the clouds anymore. I decided I'd keep the weather talk going. Afterall, I had a blog entry to write.
"You know, Baby Bear, we may have a snowstorm on Sunday and Monday. Wouldn't that be cool?" I threw at him.
He asked me a couple questions about it but nothing notable or nothing suggesting he was excited about this possibility. He then switched gears a bit by asking, ""Mommy, what's stronger, rain or hail?"
"Hail is stronger, Baby Bear," I told him.
"Can you touch hail?" he asked.
"Yep," I told him, wondering if I ever actually had.
"What is hail?" he asked.
"Well, it's a ball of frozen rain. It's really cold," I told him with a slight hint of doubt that I was right.
"Can it do damage?" he asked.
"Yeah, it can damage cars. It can damage the roofs of houses and windows on houses," I answered.
"Hail only falls from a cumulonimbus cloud," Cal informed me. Hmm... okay. This I didn't know.
"A hurricane rain can damage," he added. "It's 151 miles per hour."
I had the number 75 in my head, so I thought out loud, "I think it's 75 miles per hour. But maybe you're talking about the worst hurricanes."
He didn't say anything. We were in the parking lot of the swimming facility, so it was a good time to end our conversation.
You know what? I just did a Google search for "hail" and saw this definition: "pellets of frozen rain that fall in showers from cumulonimbus clouds." Criminy.
No comments:
Post a Comment