She ate the whole planet!

My eleven year old daughter and I built a small model of the solar system while my three year old sat in the chair watching us. She was fascinated with the items spinning around the large glowing sun in the center. We used a small battery operated globe light in the center to represent the sun. Other planets were represented by various house hold items like balls of yarn, marbles, and Styrofoam balls. We were fortunate to be able to find a gumball that was the same size as earth and was printed to be an exact replica of our planet. The planets were tied to one end of a wire that came from the sun and could manually be spun for rotation. The finished project was left on the kitchen cabinet ready to be taken to school the next day. Later that evening my oldest daughter came running into my room crying hysterically with her little sister in tow. It didn’t take me long to piece together what happened when my precious toddler came in my room with blue and green slobber emitting from her mouth. “Mama, Mama, she ate Earth, she ate the whole planet!”