Generation Gap and Walrus Ears

I was reading Polar Bear, Polar Bear What Do You Hear, by Eric Carle to my Littles when the 3 yo asked about flamingo ears. We chatted about bird ears for a while. When we got to the walrus page he had similar questions, plus he wanted a detailed explanation of what a walrus ear looked like.

I've read this book dozens of times over the years. If I include the number of times I read it when I taught preschool the number triples, at least. Yet, I had no idea what a walrus ear might look like.

So off we trotted to my computer to do a search. At Marine Science is an article full of walrus pictures. Including walrus ears.

It hit me as we left the computer that when my 18 yo was a baby we didn 't even own a computer, and even if we had, the internet was not what it is today. If my 18 yo had asked about walrus ears I would have had to: remember the question and gone to the library to look up a book with a good picture.

My oldest child is in a different generation than my youngest two children. So strange, I knew that sippy cup technology had changed from first baby to seventh baby but I never thought about how much the world itself had changed.