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!”
I have been fielding so many questions about butterflies, moths, and ticks, that when The Eight-Year-Old asked me what a saddle bug was, I leapt to the obvious and told her I thought it was a type of flea. Spoiler alert: It’s not. As far as I can tell, my daughter was actually thinking about a type of caterpillar.
When The Eight-Year-Old asked me why my hair was turning grey this last week, I was so tempted to simply answer with a quick and trite: “Parenthood.” The real answer, though, has more to do with melanin – or the lack of it.
The Eight-Year-Old wandered into the kitchen the other day while I was prepping a blueberry and spinach smoothie. While watching me stuff the blender with spinach and almond milk, she asked, “Mommyo, if you ate only spinach, how much spinach would you have to eat to maintain your weight?”
My daughter wanted to know what an ant’s mouth looked like. So I used the power of the Google and found a bunch of images of ant mandibles for her, courtesy of Paul Illsley’s blog Tiny Faces in Nature.
My cat has an extraordinary super power. He is able to demonstrate the meaning of words. (To be fair, he reads a lot.) In today’s lesson, Canelo teaches The EIght-Year-Old the meaning of bliss.
I knew walking in to Dr. Paul Sereno’s Fossil Lab at the University of Chicago last Tuesday that I’d see a ton of dinosaur bones (perhaps even literally). But what I didn’t expect to see were the human remains and bits of pottery that were scattered about as well. Seeing all that non-dinosaur stuff prompted a question: “What do paleontologists do with all the things they find that they weren’t actually looking for?”
This week, The Eight-Year-Old and I got to meet world-famous paleontologist, Dr. Paul Sereno. After three years of hunting for the answer to my daughter’s question about whether or not dinosaurs had belly buttons, I was finally in a paleontology lab with both a world-famous paleontologist and a dinosaur mummy. I bet you can guess what happened next.
On a recent visit to the Boston Museum of Science, my daughter asked “Did dinosaurs have belly buttons?” We did our best to find out, using the evidence available to us at the time.
While visiting a butterfly garden, my daughter noticed something strange. Butterflies have long thin antennae, but moths often have wide feathery ones. Why is that?
When my daughter realized I couldn’t tell the difference between alligators and crocodiles, she told me I needed to write a Caterpickles about it. “That’s the only way you’ll ever learn it, Mommyo.” Fortunately for me, telling the difference is pretty simple–it’s all in the snout, the teeth, and the water.
CATERPICKLES 