“Which part of the butterfly is the thorax?”
“Which part of a butterfly is the thorax?”
“What else pops balloons?”
My daughter’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…
In which my daughter teaches me about upcycling
The last time I tried to throw away my four-year-old’s stash of empty toilet paper rolls, she talked me into making a Father’s Day gift with them instead. Turns out there are a ton of kids’ crafts that use items we adults would otherwise simply recycle.
“Will my balloon fly all the way to the moon?”
The first time my 4-year-old saw her brand new balloon float away into the sky, she thought it was pretty awesome right up until the moment she realized it wasn’t coming back. When she had recovered enough to ask questions, she naturally wanted to know how high it would go before it popped.
“What does a toothache look like?”
Lately my daughter has been asking me a lot of questions that seem designed to get me to floss more. A few days ago, she asked if the enamel on our bathtub was the same stuff we had on our teeth. Today she asked what a toothache looks like.
“Why did they think T. Rex stood with his tail on the ground?”
The Museum of Science in Boston boasts two life-size statues of the T. Rex. The one in the permanent dinosaur exhibit stands in the now-classic T. Rex pose: the predator in mid-stride, while the other stands primly with his tail on the ground. How do scientists know which stance is right? And why do they change their minds about dinosaurs all the time?
“Do you need a lot of shots to go to Botswana?”
I suppose this entry should really be titled, “Why did our daughter ask me how many shots she would need to go to Botswana?”, because that’s what my husband actually said when he came back downstairs after putting our 4 year old to bed last night.
“Is the enamel on our bathtub the same stuff that’s on my teeth?”
One night as she was splashing around in her bright pink bath water my four-year-old asked me what the tub was made of. As it turns out, the bathtub she uses is one of those old timey clawfoot jobs made of cast iron with a porcelain enamel coating. When I told her this, she immediately perked up and asked: “Is the enamel on our bathtub the same stuff that’s on my teeth?”
“Why does Texas have more tornadoes?”
Tornadoes can happen anywhere, not just in the flat plains of Texas and the Midwest east of the Rockies. But Texas gets a lot of them because cold dry air from Canada often collides with warm wet air from the Gulf over Texas.
“Do ants take baths?”
One fine summer evening, we were debating whether or not the youngest, stickiest member of our family should take a bath. My daughter, clearly looking for models from the animal kingdom to support her argument that a slight coating of sand and dried ice cream is not immediately fatal to those lucky enough to wear it, asked, “Do ants take baths?”
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