There is a curious phenomenon that occurs in all children as the sun descends. No one knows the true cause for this universal experience. Call it a witching hour or a mass hysteria or perhaps some innate thirst for understanding that is finally undistracted by the possibilities of daylight.
This phenomenon, of course, is the nightly ritual of asking a completely unreasonable number of largely esoteric questions right before bed.
As darkness crept across the northern skyline, Jen braced herself for the nightly onslaught.
"Where does snow come from?" her cub asked, attempting to clamber up onto the mother bear's back.
"The sky," Jen answered.
The cub seemed disappointed by the deftness of her response, but she quickly rallied.
"Where do fish go to sleep?"
Jen thought for a moment. She had never seen a fish sleep - she assumed they had to at some point. "The water," she answered with an air of false confidence.
"Are ghosts real?"
"No..."
"If a bunny jumped up as high as it could from the top of a super high mountain, would it get stuck in the sky?"
"I doubt it."
"I blink to keep water out of my eyes - do fish blink all the time?"
Back to fish, thought Jen, maybe she's running out of steam.
"I don't know." Jen lay down and started to close her eyes, hoping her cub had developed the ability to pick up on social cues sometime in the last 24 hours.
"What's stronger, a polar bear or a beluga whale?"
"A polar bear." She answered with her eyes closed.
The cub could see that she was running out of time and she needed to pull out the big guns if she wanted to further delay the crushing boredom of sleep. But big questions were not without their risk. It was a gamble that either she could get an extra 5 minutes out of them, or her mother would immediately shut it down.
She took a deep breath, then blurted out innocently, "Where do babies come from?"
She waited for a moment.
Silence.
She walked across her mother and put her face as close as possible to Jen's, but she did not budge.
Faint but suspiciously deliberate snores escaped the mother bear's snout. Defeated, the cub lay down. She had flown too close to the sun.
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