“Do mosquitoes migrate?”
Mosquito Week continues with a look at why we get a break from those pesky biters (at least in the Northeast) in the winter.
“Why are mosquito bites little red bumps?”
One day, after I (gently) batted The Four-Year-Old’s hand down from scratching at two bites on her face, she asked, “Mommyo, why are mosquito bites little red bumps?”
In Which The Four-Year-Old Trips Down Memory Lane
The Four-Year-Old, swinging her feet innocently as she sits in her favorite too-tall-for-me chair: “Mommyo, remember those old times when you used to take the iPhone…
Make Way for Teddy! and Other News of the Week
NASA finds water on one of Jupiter’s moons, performing medical techniques on stuffed animals is good practice for future veterinarians, the end of animal testing, and other news of the week.
Book Review: Brambly Hedge
I learned about Jill Barklem’s Brambly Hedge books through Snapdragons, a blog about the domestic adventures of a new mom. The author of the blog had grown up reading these stories and was very excited about the prospect of sharing them with her own child. I’d never heard of them, but as I’m always on the look out for new books to read with The Four-Year-Old, I spent a week or two hunting them down.
“How big is a zombie?”
The Four-Year-Old is an expert practitioner of the art of delaying bedtime. So much so, that I’m convinced that putting off bedtime is the way children develop the vital life skill of procrastination.
Still, bedtime is bedtime and not, as The Four-Year-Old claims, the best time for hunting polar region allosaurs, so something had to be done.
“Did Elvis have a cat?”
The Four-Year-Old adores dinosaurs, cats, and Elvis. So naturally she wants to know all the combinations in which these revered beings might have co-existed. Dinosaurs as the Four-Year-Old thinks of them having died out years before Elvis was born, he clearly wouldn’t have had them as pets at Graceland. But did Elvis ever have a cat?
WANTED: Red Bell Pepper Recipes
We interrupt our regularly scheduled afternoon radio silence with this urgent announcement. Our CSA has had a bumper crop of peppers this fall, and as a…
“Why are letters in alphabetical order?”
This week’s reader question comes from Ben in San Antonio, who tweets via his father to ask “Why are letters in alphabetical order?” My husband’s reasoned, if not helpful, response to this is “For the same reason numbers are in numerical order.” There must be a better answer, I thought. So I dug around until I found one.
“What’s the top speed of a preschooler?”
The Four-Year-Old, chasing her father in a game of tag: “I can’t run my usual speed for that long.” Father: “Why is that?” The Four-Year-Old, huffing…
CATERPICKLES 