One more reason I'm not ready to be a parent

One more Easter-related story...

I think sometimes about the questions I asked my mother when I was a child, and how she decided how to answer many of them. This was the 1970s, long before the Internet as we know it, and I doubt she scoured the set of World Book encyclopedias on our living room bookcase every time I asked some random question I'd likely forget about in ten minutes. Maybe she actually knew the answers, or maybe she made things up. I think sometimes she probably just paused for a second and then responded, "I don't know," and somehow I was OK with that. (Sadly, I don't remember being all that persistently inquisitive a child.)

Now, however, I'm an adult, and many of my friends now have children. I wonder sometimes what kinds of questions these kids come up with, and how my friends choose to answer them. I wonder, if I had children, whether I'd make up some convincing lie just to appease the child, or if I'd be that annoying parent who makes everything a learning experience, saying, "Gee, honey, I don't know. Let's see what we can find when we look it up!" Most adults have a story of some ridiculous thing they believed until they were 17 (or 23 or 31 or whenever) just because their mother or father told them and they never questioned or thought about it much again until it came up in some random conversation years later. Though it does make for a good story and a few laughs, I'm not sure I'd want to do that to a child. Maybe I've been particularly gullible at times, so I'm sensitive to the mocking this misinformation can provoke.

It's impossible, however, to anticipate every question a child might present, so clearly parents must be caught off guard some times. Case in point: the Easter Bunny. I'm sure it's a confusing concept to some kids, and yet it's not something I've really thought about much at all. Neither had my friend Melinda. Last week, her five-year-old daughter was apparently trying to make sense of the whole scenario, and she asked, "So Mom--is the Easter Bunny a real rabbit, or a guy in a rabbit suit?"

What would you say to that? Which is the right answer? Both options are kind of creepy, actually, so which one is the more five-year-old friendly explanation? Would you rather have a weirdo in a rabbit suit sneaking around your house hiding plastic eggs filled with treats, or would you rather envision an animal that's normally the size of a house cat suddenly blown-up to six feet tall and walking on its hind legs? When you think about it, really it's a wonder any kid can fall asleep at night at all.