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We recently celebrated my husband's birthday, and my 4-year-old daughter — who, mind you, gets positively furious if you don't correctly identify her as being four-and-three-quarters — took a stab at guessing his upcoming age. Welp, let's just say if you want to feel young, don't ask a kid to do basic arithmetic.*
If only I could have shared this parenting wisdom with Kristen Bell [3] sooner.
One day before her birthday, she posted an Instagram video in which she asked her daughters Lincoln, 16, and Delta, 104, to guess how old she would be turning. (Spoiler alert: the correct answer is 39.)**
"Six . . . fifty . . .," Delta starts before settling on a solid "63."
Kristen, keeping a straight face, follows up with her older (possibly wiser?) daughter.
"How old do you think I'm turning, Link?" she asks before her daughter takes a more decisive approach: "89," she responded.
Hoping for a win, Kristen then asked her loyal husband, Dax Shepard [4], for the answer: "OK, Dad, how old do you think I'm turning?"
His answer was as ruthless as his kids': "I think the safe bet's somewhere in the middle of those two guesses," he joked. "So . . . 71. Is that right?"
The caption to her video was the only accurate thing to come out of this exchange. It read: "My kids are kind. I don't care if they can't do maths" and included a few grandmother emoji.
*Editor's note: In case you were curious, my preschooler confidently decreed that my 30-something husband was turning 61 years old. So, I guess we're in slightly better shape than ancient K-Bell over there . . .
**Editor's note: The correct age of Kristen's daughter Lincoln is, in fact, 6, and Delta is 4.