curious

What Do Bob Dylan and Lava Have In Common?

| patmcg
Molly with NASA controls
“Yes, Molly, that is a real spaceship control panel.”

Molly is at that age now where she is trying to figure out what in the world is real and what is made up.  Tonight she asked if lava is real.  Why yes.  Yes, it is.  Reflecting on this fact some more, it seemed strange that lava is real.  I mean really… super hot molten rock that oozes out of mountains and cannot be stopped by anything?  If you fall into it, you die?  That is a ridiculous comic book idea, right?  That can’t be real.

On the drive home from school, Molly asked if Bob Dylan was real.  Molly is not typically a music fan, unless it’s from Frozen or another Disney movie, but she asked to hear “that Mr. Tambourine Man thing”.  She asked who was singing it, and I said Bob Dylan.  “Is Bob Dylan real?”  Yes, of course he’s real.  Jeez, he’s Bob Dylan!  But then again, he is singing a song just like Elsa from Frozen, and Elsa is not real.  “Is Mr. Tambourine Man real?”  No, Mr. Tambourine is not real.  He’s just sort of a character, or an idea, or something.  Jeez.

And consider Elsa from Frozen.  Of course she’s not real, she from a movie, silly!  What about Winter the dolphin from the movie A Dolphin Tale?  Oh yeah, she’s real.  We saw her in person.  Whaaaaa?

This must be terribly confusing for a kid.  It seems so arbitrary.  Dinosaurs are real, or at least they were real, but now they’re gone.  So you’ll never actually see one.  Oh yeah, and nobody even knew they existed until 150 years ago.  This is pretty clear, right?

Claire had some questions about dinosaurs back around this age too.  Nowadays, Claire and I are talking a lot about other mysterious real things, especially atoms and molecules.  The big question is “How many atoms are in a ___?”, where the blank might be a muffin, a speck of cinnamon on the muffin, a dog, or the world.  The answer is always the same: “Too many to count.”  At her request, I looked up how many atoms are in the world.  The answer was roughly 133,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.  Claire was not impressed.  That did not look like such a big number after all.  I tried to explain to her why that was a bigger number than you could possibly ever wrap your head around.  Her eyes glazed over.  Then it was back to discussing My Little Pony.

Many New Questions

| patmcg

Claire has started to ask some rather interesting questions about the world.

For example, you may recall that she likes to pretend to be working at a fast food drive-through, sticking her head out and saying, “You want a combo? You want cheese?” It still cracks us up. Lately, she has extended this game to sit-down dining, holding a notepad and crayon in hand, saying, “You want bar-b-que? You want Diet Coke?” Anyways, the other night at dinner Claire said, “Combo? What’s that? I’ve never seen a combo.” It must seem funny to her. Every time you ask for a combo, you get a hamburger, fries, and a drink instead. But what the heck is a combo? It must be some kind of food. Does it taste good?

Claire also noted recently that she has never seen a dinosaur. This is a pretty remarkable observation. She has seen most of the other animals we talk about, at least at the zoo or the aqauarium. She has seen elephants, lions, meerkats, whales, sharks, birds, and countless other fun animals. But what is with these reclusive dinosaurs? There is no dinosaur display at the zoo. I told her that is good because they are awfully big and fast and scary, to which she agreed, “Yeah!” and did a big roar sound. I also told her they have a dinosaur skeleton on display at the airport, but that did not especially interest her.

She also seems to be grappling with the seemingly arbitrary distinction between girls and boys. This topic came up during dinner when her school friend Nathan was mentioned as being a boy. “Girls and boys. What’s that? That’s silly!” This one I could not readily explain other than to say that they’re all just kids. But she has a good point. Why do you have to specify someone’s gender every time? You might as well use different words for kids with different colored hair.

It is a strange and confusing world indeed.

Remote Entry

| patmcg

When Kit left for work this morning, her car was sitting there in front of the house at 5:30 am with the trunk and widows open. The car was unlocked, and the seats were “all moist” from the humid night air. Kit didn’t leave the car wide open last night, so what happened here?

Yesterday, Kit had rushed out of work “early”, at 7:00 pm, so she could see just a little bit of Claire before her 7:30 bath and bedtime. When Kit got home, she put her car keys down on a stool by the door and picked up Claire for a nice extended hug. When Claire was back on her feet, she immediately reached for the car keys. She loves the keys, especially the remote entry buttons, which she mashes a lot. Sometimes it even makes the car honk outside the window.

Claire had pressed the “open trunk” button at least once, and did something to open the windows too. I used to accidentally annoy Kit by somehow cracking the windows with the remote entry buttons, but I never even knew how I did it. Apparently Claire picked up the same trick, and it is a lot cuter when she does it.

Curious Claire and the Cat

| patmcg


Claire loves Curious George. She loves the books, and she just discovered the cartoon on TV this morning when I stumbled on it during breakfast. When the show was finished, she politely asked for “more Georgie”, as she always does with things she loves.

Anyways, it’s no wonder Claire loves Georgie. She basically is Curious George. She is a good little girl, and always very curious. She wanders around the house with her big sweet eyes scanning each room for something new to tinker with. She loves to “help” around the house, especially with the dishwasher. Yesterday she helped load some of her clean cups into the dishwasher, and take some dirty ones out. I thought I got it all straightened out, but when I emptied the dishwasher today, Claire’s popping wind-up car was sitting on the top rack, filled with water. I guess it needed a cleaning.

Today after Grace had left and Claire woke up from her nap at 5:30, we saw a black kitty cat out the window relaxing on our driveway. Claire really loves cats, so we decided to go say “hi”. As we slowly approached, the cat looked more and more suspicious, specifically eyeing Claire and occasionally looking at me for some sort of indication that everything was cool. After all, there I was holding this pink and yellow, wiggly, three-foot-tall kid who was pointing and giggling right at the cat. But the cat held her position.

About 10 feet out, Claire was finally in “hi” range. She stuck out her right arm, squeezed her little fingers in and out as if juicing an orange, and said “hiiiiii” in her little squeaky voice. The cat took this threat seriously and jogged off just out of “hi” range. Claire and I slowly and clumsily advanced and repeated the exchange. This exercise went on a few times until we ended up three houses down and the cat finally disappeared into some bushes. Claire looked at me sadly, did the hand sign for “more”, and longingly said “more kitty” a couple of times. But I was not going in after that cat, plus we were wandering uninvited into some unknown neighbor’s slightly creepy yard.

This was a very Curious George moment, and I felt bad for cutting it short. But once we got inside, Curious Claire buried her sorrow in a plate full of four-cheese “patsa”. Yes, fuel for more adventures.