Duckie factory

We visited a Budweiser brewery in New Hampshire last month, and it made a big impression on Henry. Tonight at dinner, as we were eating our grilled sausage and rice and salad, he said, contemplating the ketchup bottle, "I'd like to visit a ketchup factory!" We agreed that would be fun. We told him there are hot dog and pretzel and chocolate factories nearby, so maybe we could go to one of those. Later, while watching his movie before bed, he said, "Is there a duckie factory, Mom?" "You mean, where they make rubber duckies? I guess there is." "No, but I'd like to see where they make real duckies, the ones that float on the water." When I figured out he meant the real animals, I told him that people don't make animals, they live in the wild and reproduce themselves, having babies. "But they had to make everything in the world, right?" "huh?" "They had to make every single thing in the world, because before that there was nothing right? For a very long day, before this day, there was nothing and they had to make everything." I agreed that every building and car and road had indeed been made by someone, but that people and animals came from nature. "They evolved, over millions of years," I said. "But how did there get to be a baby, where did it come from before that?" I began explaining eggs and sperm and then growing in the tummy, but he started to lose interest.

I guess the thing that struck me the most about this was the way he worked it out in reverse, that if people were always making things in factories, then the world must have been emptier and emptier going back into the past, until an origin point where there was nothing. His own creation myth.