not that kind of training

"Hey, Mom?" Yonah asked, staring out the car window as we drove home.

"Yeah?" I responded.

(Our conversations always seem to start like that.)

Can you believe I haven't taken any pictures of the moon?
Not even the super moon we had a little while ago.
Please accept this substitute picture. I mean,
clouds are kinda the same thing.

"Can we take everyone with us when we go to the moon tomorrow?"

I took a brief moment to think through everything we'd driven past or talked about, which might have led to this question. I couldn't think of anything that would have sparked his mind to thinking about the moon, though.

"Did you say 'the moon'?"

(A big chunk of our conversations are spent in my clarifying what he said. I hate responding incorrectly to him.)

"Yeah. The moon." He's so used to me asking for clarification that he didn't bat an eyelash. Even though he'd spoken clearly this time, and we both knew it. "You said we would go there tomorrow. You know, with our rocket?"

I really paused then. I had said that we would try to go somewhere tomorrow . . . but to the moon? "Moon" sounded nothing like what I'd been talking about. Unless my mouth had malfunctioned again. But the real problem was that he wasn't using his "I'm serious about this joke" voice. He was using the same voice he used to talk about real things, like the sun coming up every morning.

"Um. We're not going to the moon."

I caught his eyes glancing my direction in the rearview mirror. "Why?"

"Well," I said with a sigh. (I get so tired of that question. I hear it all. day. long. I love his inquisitive mind . . . but not the frequency of that one word.) "For one thing, you have to have a lot of training to go to the moon."

"Oh, like in Kung Fu Panda."