On an average day, my daughter’s question-to-declarative sentence ratio clocks in at a healthy 5:1. In this section of the blog, I explore what happens when instead of saying “I don’t know,” I say “Let’s find out!”
As you may remember from last week, The Nine-Year-Old and I have a working theory that her crickets, Narmer and Charles Allen, may have actually died from fright. We thought it was possible that after a certain unfortunate event, a surge of octopamine (the cricket version of adrenaline) flooded their system and caused their hearts to stop. Daddyo was not convinced. “Do crickets even have hearts?”
For her third grade science project, The Nine-Year-Old has been keeping a series of crickets at home. I say series, because all the male crickets keep dying off. We can’t figure out why the one female cricket would be fine, while all the males are dying. Our working theory is that upon exposure to the Cricket Hellscape that is the 9YO’s room, the males are dying of fright. But can crickets die of fright?
One of the side effects of The Nine-Year-Old’s computer classes at school has been that suddenly I have competition for the computer in the office. The Nine-Year-Old…
The other day, while cleaning out The Nine-Year-Old’s room, I came across her Top Secret Cat File. In it was a supply list with two items: “1 kindle of…
Even though paper is an insulator, not a conductor of electricity, it is possible to conduct a low level of electricity through paper, provided you have the right tools. Here’s what you’ll need to set up your own paper circuit at home.
Did you know that orange tabby cats are ranked according to the color of their coats? The darker the shade, the theory goes, the better bred the cat. Is your cat a marmalade or a lemon?
Nope. I’ve simply been taken hostage by our tax return. Caterpickles will resume regular posting once I escape this paper forest.
A week or two ago, I finally got around to telling The (now) 9YO the answer to the question her 4YO self had asked about the rules for when Y was used as a consonant, not a vowel. She listened politely until I got to my list of examples. “Mommyo, there’s no such thing as a yurt. You made that up.”
When my four-year-old daughter learned that land-based salamanders eat dragonflies (among other things), her mind had a question: “Mommyo, how do salamanders catch dragonflies?”
I still remember the stormy March day almost five years ago when my daughter learned that not all vowels were constants. A, E, I, O, and U are always vowels, but that Y is a trickster. Sometimes he’s a vowel, sometimes he’s not. This news was extremely distressing for The (then) Four-Year-Old. “Mommyo, when is y not a vowel?”
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