Arin came running to his mom with a  pretend cape around his neck. He then took a long deep breath to puff up his chest and said, “Look at me mamma, I am a superman.”  His mother smiled while continuing to work on her laptop.

Arin pretended to be a superman almost the entire day.

By the evening, something puzzled him, and he asked his mother ” How does our chest blow up when we breathe? Do we have balloons inside our body?”

“Well, almost Arin! Would you like to know about these balloons?” Arin’s mother asked.

Arin nodded in a yes and quickly jumped to sit next to his mom.

“Our lungs inflate and deflate like a balloon as we inhale and exhale air. And making this happen are million of air bags in our lungs.” Arin’s mother said.

“Millions of air bags?” Arin asked, now even more puzzled than ever before.

“Oh yes! At the end of our windpipe, there are two large tubes called bronchi (pron., brong-kye). One of these tubes goes into the left lung while the other one goes into the right lung. Each bronchus (pron., brong-kus) has tiny hair like projections called bronchioles (pron., bron-key-oles).  At the end of these bronchioles, there are millions of tiny air bags called alveoli (pron., al-vee-o-lie). When we breathe in, these alveoli get filled with air and blow-up like balloons. It’s through them that oxygen gets passed into the blood vessels that carry blood to the heart. The heart then pumps the oxygen-carrying blood to the body.”

Arin was amazed to hear how it all worked and decided to tell his friends all about “Balloons of the body.”