Today I volunteered as a parent chaperone for a school field trip to Denver's Washington Park Botanic Gardens with my son's Kindergarten/First Grade class. More about that in the next post, but for the moment here's a charming snippet of dialogue that makes for a nice sequel to the Independivore post I put up the other day:

Random kid in class: Are you Aidan's dad?

Me, trying to give polite, brief answers, and not distract the class from what the teacher was saying: Yes.

Random kid: Are you a vegetarian, too, like Aidan?

Me: Yes.

Random kid: So... you don't eat steak?

Me: No.

Random kid: What about turkey and chicken and ham?

Me: No.

Random kid: You don't even eat ham? Ham is my favorite.

My kid, mishearing, cutting in, addressing random kid: Hamsters? You eat hamsters?

Entire class: Ooooooooohhhhh, gross!

(Class thoroughly distracted... I wonder if I'll ever be asked back to volunteer in the classroom again. Whoops.)

And the truth is, typing this now, I don't even know if my kid was joking or not. It occurs to me now that it's entirely possible, given the way he's been raised, that my son has not even ever heard the word "ham" before in any kind of context. Either way, it's also true that he is hilarious, and a comic genius.

– Colin Bane