Fostering curiosity in kids (and their parents) since 2011

Posts from the ‘Miscellaneous’ category

How The Five-Year-Old helped me understand the Victorian practice of posing with their dead

Exposure times for photography in those days were extremely long, which had the perverse effect of making the dead daughter in this example the only reliably in-focus part of the image, while her (then) living parents appear blurred and more ghost-like. (Image via cogitz.com)

Earlier this week while doing some of the never-ending research for my novel-in-progress, Asylum, I came across memento mori, the Victorian practice of posing their dead for photographs. At first, I labeled this as just one more in a long line of somewhat creepy things Victorians did. But then The Five-Year-Old did something that completely changed my perspective on it.

How to make your own butterflies

Most years The Five-Year-Old and I dye eggs at Eastertime. But this year I just wasn’t feeling it. Dyeing eggs is smelly and messy and the results are generally disappointing. Also, no one in the family likes to eat hard-boiled eggs. So we made butterflies out of tissue paper instead.