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!”
When my daughter saw the Aristocats slurping happily at a bowl of cream, she naturally wanted to pour a bowl for our own cats. I had to shoot this down. Although our normally timid grey tabby would body slam our calico out of the way for a taste of the creamy stuff, the sad fact is our tabby’s tummy can’t take it. Why can’t cats drink milk?
While watching an episode of WordWorld, my daughter learned that you can change the meaning of words by shoving two words together. “Mail” and “box” become “mailbox,” for example. The glorious new rule doesn’t work for laundromat however. Why not? How did laundromats get their name?
After watching an episode of WordWorld in which Frog and three Piglets play hockey on the moon wearing nothing but a helmet, my daughter wanted to know if this behavior was typical. “Do all astronauts fly in space with just their helmets on?” So I showed her a picture of Neil Armstrong in his space suit. “Why do they need all that?”
On a trip to Davis Farmland, my daughter and I were told that goats have four stomachs. That didn’t seem like it could possibly be true, so when we got home we decided to check the facts. Turns out “goats have four stomachs” is sloppy shorthand for “goats have one very large stomach split into four compartments.” In this post we look at what each of those compartments are used for, and how a goat’s stomach changes over time.
OK, so the odds are that this guy wasn’t actually the very last dinosaur on the planet before the mass extinction, but it makes for a good headline. (Isn’t it wonderful how facts can be misconstrued so succinctly?)
But I didn’t link to the article just to make a point about its headline.
The evening in early June that my daughter and I spent huddled in our basement waiting for the tornado warning to expire is definitely in the running to be one of the formative experiences of my daughter’s childhood. Over a month later, she’s still busily processing it. Today she asked, “Can I catch some hail, Mommyo?”
Growing up in Texas, I was always told that tornadoes turn the sky green. Turns out it’s actually the water particles in the air turning the sky green, not the tornado.
This afternoon, after we had exhausted the topic of heartworm treatment in dogs (don’t ask), my daughter asked me about fleas.
Specifically, “Why don’t fleas fly?”
For one reason or another, we have a lot of old children’s books lying around our house. I was in the middle of reading one of these to my daughter over the weekend when she stopped me.
“Mommyo, why did they draw that dinosaur underwater?”
As she sat next to me previewing the finalists for last Friday’s Dinosaur Video of the Week, my daughter asked, “Can I learn all the dinosaurs, Mommyo?” “I don’t see why not,” I said. After all, my little computational wonder could already recite all 50 states in alphabetical order. How much harder could dinosaurs be? Little did I know how long and uncertain the list of dinosaur species would be.
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