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!”
This week, The Eight-Year-Old came home in triumph bearing a signed copy of Kate Hannigan’s The Detective’s Assistant. This sparked a minor disagreement about which member of our family would get to read it first. “You’ll have to get in line, Mommyo. I saw it first.” While I wait, my daughter has a homework assignment for me. “Mommyo, did Kate Warne really save Abraham Lincoln?”
The Eight-Year-Old put her recent research into simple machines to good use this weekend. Here is her soon-to-be-patent-pending Wild Tiger Rescue Kit, complete with crane, sling, and gurney transport.
Mommyo, exasperated while driving through an undisclosed intersection in Chicago: “There are pedestrians walking in 5 different directions here, which is sort of amazing, because there are…
My daughter adores Star Wars, so when she heard that there was a Darth Vader jellyfish she really wanted it to be true. But she’s been disappointed before. “Mommyo, is there really a Darth Vader jellyfish?” Yes.
After reading Three Little Pigs four times in one afternoon, The Four-Year-Old wanted to know how realistic it was. “Can you really build houses out of wheat?”
One fine summer day, The Four-Year-Old was appalled to find her self-serve jar of pickles contained only pickling juice and a few floaty pickling bits. “Mommyo, can you make me more pickles.” No, I told her. We’re out of apple cider vinegar. “Well, can you make some?” Maybe? How do you make apple cider vinegar anyway?
It’s always dangerous to boil someone’s life down to a blog post. But knowing something about a person is definitely better than knowing nothing at all, and nothing at all is what I knew when I walked into the post office last year for some stamps and walked out with a sheet of twenty Black Heritage John H. Johnson Forever stamps. And that’s a shame, because John H. Johnson was both a major American publisher and a key figure in the civil rights movement. So let’s fix that.
Astronauts living on the International Space Station still have to brush their teeth every day, preferably twice a day. There’s no “out in space” exemption for dental hygiene. But how do you get the toothbrush wet in zero gravity? Where do you spit without a sink? Why doesn’t all that mess end up in your hair? How do astronauts brush their teeth in space?
The Eight-Year-Old, watching Canelo stalk a spider in our sunroom: “Mommyo, are there bugs that get on other bugs?” Yes. There are also frogs who get on bugs. Click through for pictures.
Back when The Eight-Year-Old was only five, we spent a lovely afternoon building a village for her toy dinosaurs out of Lincoln logs. After carefully installing a sunlight in the roof of her sauropod stable, my daughter asked, “Mommyo, did any of the Presidents not like toys?” When I said that surely they all played with toys as kids, she clarified: “No, Mommyo, I’m talking about grown-ups. Did any grown-up Presidents not like playing with toys?”
CATERPICKLES 