Prime Minister Moses

(I still owe a post about Bryce, but I wanted to get this down.)  Getting ready for school today:

J: How many continents are there?
R: Seven.
J: Why are there only seven?
R: How many do you think there should be?
J: Like twenty.
R: Why?
J: So that more people could be president.
R: Oh.  Actually a president is the leader of a country, not a continent.  There are lots and lots of countries, so there are lots and lots of leaders.
J: What?  What's the difference between a country and a continent?
[I paused the conversation to go dry my hair, which gave me a minute to collect my thoughts.  When we got out the door:]
R: Okay, Jordan, I thought about your question some more, and here's what I have to say.  A continent is a big piece of land surrounded all around by oceans.
J: Right.  I know that.
R: A country is when a bunch of people agree that they want to have all the same rules and laws and be on the same team.
J:  OHH.  Okay.
R: Mostly, so far, when people have decided to have the same rules and laws and be on the same team, it has not been all the people on a whole continent.  Just some.  And the others on the same continent make a different team, which is a different country.
J: I get it.
R: There is one country that I know of that is a whole continent.  Australia.
J: They all decided, the whole continent of people, to make one country.
R [sweeping a couple centuries of colonialism and so on under the rug]: Right.
J: So they have one president.
R: They have one leader.  I don't think they call their leader the president though.  I think they call their leader the prime minister.
J [laughing]: Prime minister.  Like prime rib.  Grandpa ate prime rib at that restaurant.
R: That's funny.  Do you know what prime means?
J: No.
R: It means number one.
J: Oh.  So Grandpa had the number one rib and the leader is the number one minister.  What's a minister?
R [bogging down again]: Um.  A leader.
J: Okay.  [walking a minute]  So Moses was a minister.
R: Um.
J: And in fact he was a prince too.  So I think he was the prime minister.  Of the Jewish people.

Very logical.  Fortunately we arrived at school at that point, so I could not dig myself into a yet deeper hole.  It turns out I am all wrong about Australia, anyway; they do not have their own prime minister, but rather a Governor-General, who normally does what the Prime Minister (of Britain) says.

The real point ought to have been that political distinctions may be different from geographic ones, but who knows what Jordan will find most compelling.