I'm up watching television entirely too late, once again, and saw a commercial that struck me oddly. It started out too cute, with with little kids talking about they thought was in water...one little girl so thrilled when she said, "Mermaids!"...the commercial ended up being a water filter and ended up by saying that their system filtered out everything, even Mermaids. Now, obviously I'm not going to start a campaign against this organization who is endangering mermaids ;) However, it does make me wonder why we are so quick to make our children be little adults, to trim off all the "excess" imagination, think critically, logically, cease to dream? Is this what we really want for our children? When my kids ask me if I believe in mermaids, I ask them, what do they believe? They respond that there are depths of the ocean we have never explored and have I seen some of the wild and amazing things they "have" found. So, it is a possibility that there are mermaids we haven't found, but they don't know. Sounds logical to me, seems to be thinking critically...and still dreaming. Aliens? There are so many galaxies and so many planets, they note, and so yes, it seems to reason there are. One concludes they are most likely like us, the other is holding out for something a bit more exciting... :) Santa, hmm, they believe that one simply for the joy of believing, sort of an unspoken "suspension of disbelief". The tooth fairy, though, that is a whole other ball game. There is no question on that one as they have seen our black cat, Lucky, chasing her out of their room early one morning. Who can argue with that?