A child’s first time slip

You may have heard of a strange little story involving the Berenstain Bears.. Turns out that lots of people, people who are perfectly sane, think that they Berenstain Bears was spelled different when they were kids. Instead of “stain,” it was “stein” the premise goes.. There are websites dedicated to finding the truth of the weird conundrum.. People have sought out any all old merchandise that may feature a slip up, the “Stein” is hard to find, though. As a matter of fact, some would argue, a time slip took place and everything that was “Stein” got a Stain instead, and the name of the Berenstain Bears changed course at some point in the past. Or the future.. Or the present.. depending on when your individual slip may have occurred.

I was reminded of this Berenstain Bears issue today while driving my own 3 and a half year old son home from day care.. We were stopped at a red light, and he confusingly looked up and proclaimed, in his innocent voice, “Something here is not right.” I asked why, and he responded that the red light should be on the bottom, and the green light should be on the top. He admitted that the yellow was in the correct position in the middle..

I laughed when he told me, and he was angered. He insisted, as best he could do at his age, that when he ‘was a baby’ the red was on the bottom, and the green was on the top.. as a matter of fact, he continued to talk about the position of the lights the rest of the way home until something obscure caught his attention on the side of the road..

While my initial conclusion was that his little brain was just suffering from toddler confusion. After all, the green light always was on the bottom.

Or was it?

I suddenly thought back to the Berenstain Bears premise! The notion that a time slip happened and that suddenly the name of something was not spelled the way that we all had remembered it! And maybe, just maybe, my son just was affected by his first time slip..

Maybe when he was a baby, as he argued, the lights were reversed.. perhaps in some other timelime, the red light wasn’t on the bottom, but instead perfectly and safely nested high atop the street light? Perhaps his developing brain remembered it exactly how it was. In the time line he was in..

Or it was all just a perfectly normal brain lapse for a child in the opening development stage of his mental capacity..

Quite frankly, I have come to not be much one to laugh at any theory.. The strangest of things often proves to occur to people. After all, the paranormal and bizarre is just what happens to someone else.. and we chuckle at their expense.

Eventually the paranormal happens to us.
And everything changes.