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!”
Thanks to her on-again, off-again obsession with space, The Eight-Year-Old already knew that the modern definition of a blue moon is simply the second full moon in a given calendar month. But what she didn’t know is where the term “blue moon” came from. “Why do they call it a blue moon, Mommyo?”
If a ream of paper only weighs 4.8 lbs, why do they call it 20 lb paper?
Every year about this time, Chicago decides that blue-brown rivers are boring. So the local plumber’s union uses a top secret combination of what they pinky-swear are ecologically-safe chemicals to dye the river green. Very very green.
Our favorite four-year-old Norwood MA correspondent wrote us this week to ask whether Massachusetts had dinosaurs and, if so, where he could find them.
Chicago doesn’t get nearly as much snow as Boston does, but I’ve found that makes us appreciate every flake that falls that much more.
In his book, Why Don’t Woodpeckers Get Headaches?, birding enthusiast Mike O’Connor suggests that folks who purchase real Christmas trees place them along the fence in their backyard once Christmas is over to provide shelter this winter for local birds. That got me wondering, what else can you do with your tree once Christmas is over?
While we were driving through Orland Park a few weeks ago, we passed the Kris Kringle Haus, a holiday pop-up store specializing in European and American-made Christmas goods. It was obvious to The Seven-Year-Old that this merry little store was just the place to do a bit of Christmas shopping, but one thing was a little confusing.
The Seven-Year-Old, curiously: “Who’s Kris Kringle?”
While I enjoy all the rituals around Santa and the Easter Bunny, it is undoubtedly harder to teach your child that it’s important to care for others when your child’s world is populated by magical beings who are perfectly capable of doing all that work on their own. Here’s how I explained to my five-year-old why we can’t just sit back and expect someone else to do all the work of caring for others.
We are hosting Thanksgiving this year, and as usual, back when hosting was still a hypothetical prospect, The Seven-Year-Old and I got pretty excited about the possibilities. The Seven-Year-Old, brilliantly: “Mommyo, can we have an old-timey Thanksgiving?”
One of the things I love most about reading old books are the weird medical terms you can find buried within them. My daughter, running across the term “fever and ague” in a Little House on the Prairie book, naturally wanted to know what it meant.
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