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!”
The Four-Year-Old’s latest balloon trauma happened just this weekend, when her brand new purple balloon popped on impact with a silver car parked in the hot sun. Fortunately she has had quite a bit of experience by now dealing with balloon loss, so instead of crying, she immediately began asking questions. “What else pops balloons, Mommyo?”
Weeks ago, when The Five-Year-Old began photographing the bunnies in the Dedham Public Art Project, she asked if we could tour the pottery factory that had inspired the project in the first place. She was very disappointed when I told her that Dedham Pottery had closed in 1943. “What happened to Dedham Pottery, Mommyo?”
One afternoon while we were touring 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.
After seeing me toss the remains of her bag of freeze-dried fruit on the ground for the birds, The Five-Year-Old reached for a discarded slice of…
On hearing on Go, Diego, Go! that Pygmy marmosets are the smallest monkeys in the rainforest, The Five-Year-Old asked: “What are the tiniest monkeys in the world?”
After hearing Daddyo explain to The Five-Year-Old that in words like ‘pneumonia’ and ‘pteranodon’ the ‘p’ is silent: Mommyo, facetiously: “Where do all the silent p’s…
At every organized function The Five-Year-Old attends, someone invariably says, “Remember, we are all friends here.” It’s a lovely idea, and one that The Five-Year-Old used to agree with completely. But lately she has started to question it, because (shhh!) she has figured out that she doesn’t actually like everyone she meets. How’s a parent supposed to help her child navigate that?
When my daughter first asked this question, I immediately assumed the answer was no. But much to my surprise, bean bags are sometimes actually filled with beans. Most of the time, though, they are filled with other things. In this post, we discuss the most common materials giving your bean bags that perfect combination of floppiness and heft.
The sighting of the year’s first Model T is always cause for celebration at Caterpickles Central, because it means summer is well and truly here. The antique roadsters have been out and about for weeks now, though, and the excitement of being the first to yell “Funky old car!” on spotting one is starting to pale. One afternoon, my daughter, after spotting yet another red roadster with an exposed motor, started to wonder about the actual ages of the funky old cars on the road around us. “Mommyo, what’s the oldest model car on the road today?”
Mommyo, promptly: “Your nose and ear.” The Five-Year-Old, thoroughly: “Where else?” The iPhone, belatedly: “Cartilage is found in the joints between bones, the rib cage, the…
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