Lights out!

The other day, Owen says to me out of the blue when we were talking about going to the park, "When we leave we need to turn the lights off."

Huh. Good for him, and I guess he's paying more attention to our actions than I realize. The rest of our conversation went something like the following. Note: It's not all that easy to explain the concepts of energy/electricity and saving it to an almost-3-year-old!

Me: That’s right. Do you know why we need to turn the lights off when we leave?

Owen: No, why?

Me: Because we aren’t using them, so we turn them off.

Owen: That makes sense.

Me: They use energy so we don’t want to use any more than we need. Do you know what energy is?

Owen: Yes.

Me: What’s energy?

Owen: I don’t know. 

 (He says this all the time - "Yes" I know what something is, but when you ask him what he says "I don't know". Cute.)

Anyway, continuing on...

Me: Energy is something we use to make things go. Like lights. And cars. And we need to be careful we don’t use too much.

Owen: Why?

Me: So we don’t run out.

Owen: Then I would be sad.

Me: That’s right. Also energy, like the petrol/gas that makes cars go, sometimes makes yucky stuff that goes in the sky, so we don't want to use too much if we don't have to.

Owen: We don’t want the sky to be yucky. That doesn’t make sense.