Long road trips give ya plenty of time to think, and if you're ten years old, road trips make you blurt out solutions to seemingly impossible questions.  My daughter may have been lulled into a car coma by road noise and cloudy skies, but during the sixth hour of a road trip, she had a great point in the chicken-or-the-egg debate.

I've got three kids, but I took the quietest one on a road trip recently, and it was the most peaceful ride I've had in years!  I love all of the girls to pieces and we have a blast with the crazy chatter anytime we're on a road trip together, but a road trip with just one of the girls sure did produce a lot less noise than usual.  I had plenty of time to drive and think, and my 10-year old in the back seat spent most of the time reading and staring out the window, thinking too.

We went through long stretches of just listening to the radio in silence, and after one of those long spells of no talking, all of a sudden she started a totally random conversation.

She let out a really urgent, "Mama?!"

It snapped me out of my own car coma, and I immediately started thinking we should probably have hit the rest stop a couple of miles back because she really had to go.  But it wasn't that kind of urgency.

She continued.  "Which do you think came first, the chicken or the egg?"

Okay, good.  We can keep driving.  "Hmm...the egg I guess."  I held back on my line of reasoning so I could wait and see what she said.  And also because I didn't really have a line of reasoning.

And then she said, "I think it was the chicken because an egg would need another chicken to sit on it and hatch it, and then nurture it and help it grow."  Hmm...I hadn't thought of it that way before.  Could an egg hatch itself?

We didn't really argue it out, and frankly, I let her win the moment because I got distracted by thoughts of where we were going to stop to eat and the conversation got sidetracked by thoughts of breaded chicken strips instead of actual chickens and eggs.  And we didn't really want to think about which one came first anymore.

If you want to get strange, random thoughts our of your kids, hop in the car for a really long time and the car coma will make them blurt out something good I bet.  Just leave the electronics at home so they really have to think and dig deep.  Oh, and have an answer prepared about where babies come from and why people die.  You might get those too.

So... are we there yet?

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