Innuendo Meets a Baby

This is an old story and many have heard it and two people who might be reading this were there. You know who you are, but you never have to admit it. I'm only doing it for entertainment's sake.

One day two of my friends, a lady and a fellow, and I decided to take a trip to the local science center for a fun day of interactive learning. We were in our 20's, but that is beside the point. We walk in confidently from the heat to lovely air conditioning and to find many children running around and enjoying the activities and educational  fun. In order to disguise ourselves in this new habitat we cleverly decided to run around "acting" excited and touching everything. Eventually, after talking crap to the animatronic dinosaur and forcing little kids to wait as we messed around with puzzles that were more difficult for us than they should have been, we decided to take a break and view one of the hourly science shows.

Today they were going to light things on fire. We liked this. We liked this a lot. There was a pretty big audience, mostly made up of 6-13 year olds. This did not deter us, especially when we saw a mom with her 2 year old in her arms. Although I was intrigued by the adorable baby, I was distracted because the show about fire, and science stuff, was what had my attention. As the show began there was some introductory explanation to what they were going to do and of course as background they asked the audience questions. One of the questions they asked was so easy that the three of us didn't even bother to answer: "What are the different states of matter?

Pfft... easy peasy solid, liquid, and gas. Duh. So we let the kids answer.

After all of the states had been said. The presenter then asked: "But what is the fourth one?"

You said what? Fourth what? You said excuse me what huh?

THERE IS A FOURTH STATE OF MATTER??? WHAT IS LIFE? WHO I AM? GAH!

The kids in the audience were speaking amongst themselves. They can't seem to remember the fourth one. I look at my friends dumbstruck and they look equally confused. I am so distraught by this I can't shut my mouth. I can't even pretend like I'm thinking or I know what the hell she is talking about because my mind has just been blown. Then out of freaking nowhere the 2 year old baby, yes I said it, THE 2 YEAR OLD BABY looks at the presenter from the mother's arms and says, quietly and calmly "Plasma."

No, it's fine baby. I just went through four years of college for kicks.

And the presenter, very effectively looking nonchalant about the amount of strange that just occurred, says: "correct". I looked at my friends for reassurance that they had just heard what I had just heard and that this wasn't a heat stroke delusion, but in fact a baby just went all scientist on us. All I could think of was that I had taken a college level biology class taught by people with doctorates and that baby hadn't even been introduced to Dr. Seuss yet. It wasn't a weird heat dream, it was real and I felt like both crying in a corner and stealing that baby for research at the same time.


After that there was no going back to every day life. In my day Pluto was a planet and there were three states of matter. Too much had just happened at once and my life had changed too dramatically. A baby had just upstaged all of us in a building that we had been to a thousand times before about a subject we have studied for 16 years or more.

After that, the presenter proceeded to set a tornado on fire, but I just couldn't get into it.

Thanks a lot, baby.