Wordless Wednesday: Eleanor Roosevelt’s Famous Blueberry Pudding
A friend of ours who collects vintage cookbooks shared with us this charming, hand-lettered recipe from Eleanor Roosevelt for blueberry pudding. The Eight-Year-Old and I are still…
“Did Kate Warne really save Abraham Lincoln?”
This week, The Eight-Year-Old came home in triumph bearing a signed copy of Kate Hannigan’s The Detective’s Assistant. This sparked a minor disagreement about which member of our family would get to read it first. “You’ll have to get in line, Mommyo. I saw it first.” While I wait, my daughter has a homework assignment for me. “Mommyo, did Kate Warne really save Abraham Lincoln?”
What’s The Eight-Year-Old reading this week?
This week, The Eight-Year-Old reads The Johnstown Flood by Rebecca Johnson, The Kingfisher Dinosaur Encyclopedia by Michael Benton, and The New Way Things Work by David Macauley and Neil Ardley.
“Who was John Harold Johnson?”
It’s always dangerous to boil someone’s life down to a blog post. But knowing something about a person is definitely better than knowing nothing at all, and nothing at all is what I knew when I walked into the post office last year for some stamps and walked out with a sheet of twenty Black Heritage John H. Johnson Forever stamps. And that’s a shame, because John H. Johnson was both a major American publisher and a key figure in the civil rights movement. So let’s fix that.
“Did any of the Presidents not like toys?”
Back when The Eight-Year-Old was only five, we spent a lovely afternoon building a village for her toy dinosaurs out of Lincoln logs. After carefully installing a sunlight in the roof of her sauropod stable, my daughter asked, “Mommyo, did any of the Presidents not like toys?” When I said that surely they all played with toys as kids, she clarified: “No, Mommyo, I’m talking about grown-ups. Did any grown-up Presidents not like playing with toys?”
Happy Thanksgiving!
My daughter was underwhelmed by the Plymouth Rock when she first saw it. “Mommyo, is that the real Plymouth Rock?”
What’s The Eight-Year-Old reading this week?
Our mostly-weekly survey of the tidbits that cross The Eight-Year-Old’s desk. This week, we meet the not-so-newly discovered Hellboy dinosaur and mourn the loss of the world’s oldest living cat. The 8YO also reads Pioneer Cat by William H. Hooks, Call of the Wild: A Mutts Treasury by Patrick McDonnell, and The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle.
“Why are carrots orange?”
Lately, The Eight-Year-Old and I have been seeing purple carrots pop up all over Chicago. Seeing the white, purple, and orange carrot medley on my plate at a recent dinner, reminded my daughter of an old question. “Why are carrots orange?” Turns out there’s more than one answer to that.
“Why does it rain fish in Honduras every year?”
It’s May, which means any day now a massive thunderstorm will form in Yoro, Honduras, pelting the region with heavy rain for hours. By the time the rain’s over, the ground will be covered in small, blind, silver fish. Locals call it the Lluvia de Peces (rain of fish). But why does it happen?
Was macaroni and cheese really one of Beethoven’s favorite foods?
Everything my daughter knows about classical music she learned from reading the comic strip Peanuts. So when she informed me that macaroni and cheese was Beethoven’s favorite food, I decided to check her facts. Turns out, she was right. But Beethoven’s mac and cheese definitely didn’t come out of a box.
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