When I was in the stars

 I can't remember when, but soon after he could talk, BB was asking me questions and the answers revealed to him that there was a time before he was born. It was a hard concept for him to grasp. How could time possibly exist before him! I'm not sure if I would have used these words if I had really had time to think about it, but like lots of parenting issues, I thought on my feet and finally managed to come up with an answer that satisfied him. "You were in the stars!"

Was I thinking I metaphorically, spiritually, astrologically...? I don't really know. Did I do the right thing by explaining it this way? I'm still not sure. It is however a concept that he has taken and evolved in his own way, which I am finding fascinating.

He thinks of it physically I think, as in that he was in the stars, up there in the sky. It worked well for me when Nana started to get sick and he began to understand "what means died?". As well as talking about the physical aspects of death, and talking about where the body goes when we collected conkers in a graveyard one time, I also found myself saying that your spirit goes back to the stars.

Image from http://biomatter.deviantart.com/

Some of the things that he has said about this recently I thought might be worth recording. A few  weeks ago we were driving in the car and out of nowhere he said something like "Mummy, when I was in the stars I could see you in your house and I thought you were my favourite Mummy so I choosed you!" He went on to describe our small house with the red bricks and said that he could see me and that I looked kind and cuddly and he thought I would be the best Mummy. Since then he has referred to the fact that he "choosed" me several times, and  his pet name for me has become "my cuddly one", which is so very cute.

He also says thinks like "When I was in the starts I thought..." and "When I was in the stars I saw..."

He recently participated in a developmental psychology study at Cambridge University. Part of the study was to participate in a vocabulary test, and he came out very high on the scale for his age. I have thought this was the case for a while and several people have commented on it, but it was talked about a lot during the study, as were lots of other things about the way he perceives things. I am not sure if this influenced him or not, but the other day he gave me some really detailed instructions about the food he wanted to eat and how he wanted it prepared. I commented that his instructions were very specific and he replied that he thought this was because he was in the stars for longer than most children so he got to watch a lot of things before he was born. He then continued with a marvellous tale about watching a spaceship (which sounded very much like the one Wallace and Grommit made) go to the moon, which was perhaps off topic slightly, but the fact that he referred back to this in the stars theory, and was in a way using this to account for the reasons he is ahead in some areas, interested me greatly.

I guess he was in my stars longer than the average baby too - I was nearly 40 when he was born.