"Mom, can you teach me how to pick a lock?"

So obviously, when Aaron, who is seven, asked me this question, my first response was "Why do you want to know that?" and the answer... well, he said he wanted to know how to pick the lock in case he was ever locked out of the house.  So that's not so bad.  But he really wanted to know.  "Can you use a knife?" "No." "How about a pencil?" "No." Then again, I'm not MacGyver - maybe you can pick locks with both of those things.

I told him there are special tools for that.  He wanted to know where to get them.  "You can't just go out and buy them, they're for locksmiths, people who actually pick locks for a living." Well this admission got him interested.  "That's a job?" "Yes." "And they get to have the special tools?" "Yes." "Well what do they look like?" Holy crap. 

So I let him try it with a knife just so he could see that it wouldn't work.  Now I'm not especially worried that I'm assisting a future thief here, but at the same time, I encourage them to try to see how things work, with my supervision, and I wanted him to see why a knife wouldn't work (and save my locks from irreparable damage).  Again, at least I don't think it would work.  Geoff would have said I was giving him too much information.

Geoff gets me with that all the time.  Like when I told Ocean and Ethan how meth was made.  Not that I know this from personal experience, just memories from the news.  Geoff just sort of sat there with this look on his face that said "Really? You're telling the kids what meth is made out of?"  I saw no issue with that.  Who wants to take/smoke/inject ... sorry, I have no idea how people do meth, but who wants to take ammonia?  My kids don't want to take ammonia, so that's all good.

When I told Geoff later about Aaron's interest in the lock picking and why he told me wanted to know, Geoff says "Or he wants to pick the lock of the cupboard where the PS3 games are hidden." Ah.  Well that sounds pretty likely.  I didn't tell Geoff that I let Aaron try to pick a lock with a knife.  I'm not really sure if I've numbed the curiosity or if he will ask me to help him try to pick a lock with something else.  I like to think I'm the first person he'll ask when he wants to try again.  If he does ask, I won't tell him that his Dad has a theory about why he wants to know.  And I'll let him use a pencil.