Daddy and the Kids Go Round the World!

Teresa, age 10, hanging out in pajamas

Geography is great. It's fun in itself, but it can also lead to many interesting conversations. We like to just look at a globe and travel around to different places in our imaginations. Nothing on the internet comes close to replacing a good old fashioned globe that you can hold in your hands, and of course nothing will ever come close to replacing the imagination.

Give me a globe and my mind, and all the world and all of human history are at my fingertips.

And if there's a child around who is interested, it's even more fun.

The other day, Josefina found St. Helena Island all alone down there in the Atlantic ocean, and she decided to turn it into the country of her imaginary friends. Jojo and I often talk about real geography, especially the United States. But she was in a different mental mode at this point, and I wasn't about to interfere with that.

We do have bigger globes, but this will do in a pinch

But later I was telling Teresa (our 10 year old) about how Josefina's imaginary friends lived in an imaginary country that was really St. Helena.

ME: "I don't think she wants to put her friends on that island. It's a miserable place!"

TERESA: "Who really lives there?"

ME: "Nobody. It was a place for British ships to stop on their way to South Africa. The only person who ever really lived there was Napoleon" (obviously that was a bit hyperbolic...).

TERESA: "Napoleon lived there?"

ME: "Yeah, he lived the last dozen years or so of his life there. That's where the British kept him prisoner."

Teresa looked at me like, wow that's pretty crazy, so I continued...

ME: "Well, he had his own house and servants and friends who came with him, and he could go anywhere he wanted on the island, but British warships circled it 24 hours a day. That's how scared they were of Napoleon Bonaparte."

TERESA: "Bonaparte? What's Bonaparte?"

ME: "His last name, Napoleon Bonaparte. His last name was Bonaparte."

I could have gone off on a tangent all about the Bonaparte family, the Corsican people, the Second Empire, but I couldn't stop laughing after she said...

TERESA: "Bonaparte? I thought his last name was Dynamite!"

None of us have even seen this movie!