My 5-year-old son asks me how many times I pooped in my lifetime.

I am a 38M, and my 5YO son is currently into numbers and arithmetic, all thanks to YouTube. Every day after work, he would review the multiplication table before going to bed and practice some basic arithmetic problems on his magnetic drawing board with me.

One day, he asked about the whole concept of numbers and mathematics in general, why it existed, and what they were for. Naturally, I would use the classic "I have x amount of apples" as an example to sort of explain what numbers and arithmetic are used for in real life. Though he is clever enough to solve basic arithmetic as well as memorize the multiplication table up to the 6 times table, his attention span is short, as it should be for a pre-schooler. As he has trouble understanding the apples example, I moved on to using the variable of how much I pooped this week to explain the concept. I told him examples such as "If I usually go to the bathroom 8 times this week and I only went 4 times, how many times left should I go?" Aside from the endless laughter and cackling from him, he eventually understood the concept.

But being a pre-schooler, who is starting to experiment or challenge the things he learned in kindergarten or from YouTube, he started to experiment by asking more questions. "How many times did you poop this month?" followed by "How many times did you poop this year?" and eventually "How many times did you poop in your whole lifetime?" Aside from literally laughing my butt off from those series of questions, I did feel a sense of pride that I got the opportunity to explain while introducing him to algebra at his age.

But before I started making calculations, I had him guess or make an estimate of the frequency. He instantly said 1 Million, with the rationale that I am old (His words, not mine). It's a good guess, but I think he is a bit off the mark. So to prove his estimate, I started making variables. There are 365 days in a year, and I pooped on average twice a day. So that is 730 bathroom trips every year. I am 38, so it's 730*38, totaling 27,740 lifetime bathroom trips.

As a result, he was actually disappointed that his estimate was wrong, but was amazed to discover that he could make estimates based on inferences. He also understood that 1 million is really a big number, knowing that nobody poops that much in their lifetime. While I did this mini-TED talk with him, I could feel my wife rolling her eyes on the otherside of the bed.

TL;DR: I used the question as an opportunity to teach him algebra, and used it to calculate based on inferences.