Rainy winter mornings when The Four-Year-Old wakes up early and there are guests in the house simply scream for complicated breakfasts. This is especially fun when The Four-Year-Old is in a measuring and stirring sort of mood.
Or how my husband used a jalapeno to get my daughter to eat her carrots.
Foiled in her attempt to make chicken nuggets the centerpiece of our Thanksgiving table, my frustrated four-year-old daughter naturally wanted to know: “Why is turkey such a popular dish at Thanksgiving?” Turns out you can read 15 articles on the topic and encounter the same 4 theories. But you don’t have to, because I did. Here’s why so many Americans still eat turkey for Thanksgiving dinner.
We interrupt our regularly scheduled afternoon radio silence with this urgent announcement. Our CSA has had a bumper crop of peppers this fall, and as a…
The Four-Year-Old, munching contentedly on a milk chocolate pumpkin: “Mommyo, do you know why Sproing Cats eat a lot of sugar?” Mother: “No.” The Four-Year-Old, licking…
Mother, after mashing up a banana to use as the middle layer in a traditional Icelandic devil’s cake, thinks, “Mashed bananas were the first food I…
My daughter is a watermelon fiend. Given the option, she would eat nothing but watermelon at every meal. In the midst of a recent watermelon binge, my daughter paused long enough to spit out a question along with a black seed. “Why are watermelons red inside, Mommyo?”
Last night during storytime, my daughter listened patiently to an entire page of Under the Harvest Moon by Stella Gurney before interrupting my husband with a question. “What’s a dormouse, and how did it get its name?”
One evening while pulling the meat from a rotisserie chicken to make tortilla soup, I discovered the bird’s wishbone and decided to use it as a Teachable Moment. When I presented the wishbone to my daughter, she asked, “What’s a wishbone for, Mommyo?” To which I replied, “Well you hold this end and I hold that end, and we pull to see who gets to make a wish.” “No, Mommyo. What’s a wishbone really for?”
In which my daughter makes effective use of literalism and a long pause.
CATERPICKLES 