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!”

“Why aren’t there flying cars?”

One afternoon, while we were stuck in traffic, my daughter asked, “Why aren’t there flying cars?” Turns out there are. We just aren’t driving them yet.

“Is there an asteroid in our sky?”

Turns out there’s an awful lot of space stuff in the sky above Earth. Including some rather sizable asteroids.

“Why are caterpillars so mushy?”

While we were doing the caterpillar-tickling experiment this week, the question of how to tickle the caterpillars had to be dealt with early on. I ruled out using our fingers on grounds of caterpillars being too mushy. That of course led to questions about why caterpillars are so mushy.

A five-year-old girl tickles a caterpillar with a flower.

“Are caterpillars ticklish?” Part 2: The Testing

If you’re just joining us, yesterday my five-year-old ask me if caterpillars were ticklish. Today is the day we find out.

“Are caterpillars ticklish?”

When my five-year-old asked her father, who was a Harvard researcher at the time, if caterpillars were ticklish, he laughed for about 5 minutes. What does being ticklish mean for a caterpillar anyway? Can caterpillars laugh? And if they do, how can we hear them? It’s the perfect setup for a Caterpickles experiment.