History, revisited

Aaron and I try to have engaging civics and political conversation over family dinner with the boys whenever we can all sit down to together.  Tonight we were talking about speaking different languages (more on that later).  Aaron explained to Sam that the people who first came to America to live were from England so they spoke English and that is how English became the language of America.  

"Yes!" I said, excited to contribute to the conversation.  "When the pilgrims came over with Christopher Columbus to America...."

Aaron looked at me with baffled eyes.  "Uh, can you just be quiet during the history lessons?"

This reminds me of the time when, after a few too many glasses of wine, I asked a group of Russians gathered at my friend Kelly's for Thanksgiving dinner how they celebrate Thanksgiving in their country. When the conversation stopped cold and everyone stared at me I tried to cover for my absurdity by mumbling something about how of course I knew Russians don't have Thanksgiving, per se, but I believed that most cultures had some sort of fall harvest festival.    

I think Aaron has a good point.

Updated:  My husband thinks I should not post this blog entry because he doesn't want anyone out there in Internet-land to think I am as silly* as my comment.  May I just say that in my brain I know the chronological order of events - Native Americans were here, Christopher Columbus "discovered" America in the 1400s and the pilgrims came to what is now the USA over 100 years later.  (I did not even have to google the information disclosed in the previous sentence.)  However, sometimes my excitement gets ahead of my knowledge.

* Silly - what he really means is stupid.  But he knows better to use stupid in any sentence referring to me AND we are teaching the boys that stupid is a bad word.  So while I will happily use the F word in a blog post, I cannot use the word stupid.