Fostering curiosity in kids (and their parents) since 2011

Posts from the ‘Questions’ category

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!”

“Did Elvis have a cat?”

The Four-Year-Old adores dinosaurs, cats, and Elvis. So naturally she wants to know all the combinations in which these revered beings might have co-existed. Dinosaurs as the Four-Year-Old thinks of them having died out years before Elvis was born, he clearly wouldn’t have had them as pets at Graceland. But did Elvis ever have a cat?

“Why are letters in alphabetical order?”

This week’s reader question comes from Ben in San Antonio, who tweets via his father to ask “Why are letters in alphabetical order?” My husband’s reasoned, if not helpful, response to this is “For the same reason numbers are in numerical order.” There must be a better answer, I thought. So I dug around until I found one.

“How do you trim a cactus?”

Last week, one of my readers lamented that with all the questions my daughter asks, I’ll never need to take reader questions. But the fact is, I love those too. This week’s question comes from Chris, who writes in to ask “How do you trim a cactus?”

close-up of a grey tabby showing the discharge from his eye.

“What’s that red stuff coming out of the cat’s eye?”

I know what you’re thinking. I can hear you from here. “For heaven’s sake, woman! Get that cat to a vet! Don’t sit around blogging about it!” And while in general I would agree with you, in this particular case, the red stuff in question was due to a previously diagnosed condition and not the result of an unfortunate Preschooler-Cat interaction. So, what is the red stuff coming out of my cat’s eye?

A simple chart plotting the ROI of going to various places based on how many shots you'll need and how likely it is you will find fossils there

Caterpickles Cleans House

The Four-Year-Old has been asking questions much more quickly than I can research and answer them. At the moment, my pending questions queue has some 115 questions in it. So in an effort to tame the beast a bit, I’m going to break with my one primary question per Caterpickle routine and deal with several unrelated questions about glow-in-the-dark cats, fossils in Iceland (or the lack thereof), and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer all at once.