"Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once." - Ray Cummings
",space is what keeps it all from happening to you." Some truck-stop bathroom stall wall.
Your child is 10, in a blink; mine is 12, going on 24 and my RIU account is 13. Time is probably the most talked about cosmic quality in our house. I remember when my child was learning how to read the analog clocks in pre-school. She couldn't wrap her head around the fact that 12 happens twice and that the military clock has 24 hours instead of 12. She just couldn't math it out quite yet. So I found a youtube video for kids explaining how to read analog clocks and how the origins of the 24-hour day division developed all the way back to Mesopotamia. So in the middle of her existential crisis about time and math I made the fatal mistake of asking her a very adult phrased question, "Do you have 6 minutes I could borrow?"
My wife turned pale. My child exploded into a flurry of tears and angst. "How can I possibly loan you 6 minutes? I don't even know what 6 minutes is! I can't hold it in my hands, or loan it to you." Then the four year old child collapses on the floor in tears. My wife and I pick her up, wipe her face off, give her glass of water and sit her down to watch this short kid's video. When it's done she's completely placid, "Oh ok that makes sense now."
Memories, parenting, and time, oh my. Nothing like a child's first existential crisis about time. The whole time she melted down, there was a voice in my the back of my head saying, "Don't mention relativity. Don't mention relativity. Don't mention relativity." I could see the look in my wife's eyes saying, "Go physicist and you're a dead man." So I saved that one for a few days until she'd figured out the clock.
A common phrase my child will now use, "Dad, I don't have time for an existential crisis, I have homework to do." As I mention something about gravitational waves.
Got about 90 minutes?