I love school drop-off mornings — when we get to hang out at Mozart’s before school.
Claire and I have about an hour get a drink (an iced mocha and a cold brew, please) after dropping off Molly. We share memes or talk about the universe. The multiverse has been a major topic lately. 🤷🏻♂️
Then we usually settle into Claire playing Genshin on her iPhone and me working on my laptop before heading out and starting the day for real.
With Claire off at a camp, I had Molly to myself tonight. We stopped by Wataburger at her special request and took it for a picnic on the way home.
At the Whataburger, Molly launched two riddles at me.
The first was “Are there more wheels or doors?” I asked, “Do you mean, like, in the whole world?”. “Yep!” she said.
Looking out at the parking lot and street, I initially said, “It’s got to be wheels.” But Molly pointed out that while every car has four wheels, it has four doors too. And the office building across the streets easily had hundreds of doors. And cabinets. Also, something about legos. 🤷🏻♂️
I was convinced. Doors it is!
At the park, Molly asked if water is wet.
Again, my initial instinct was wrong. 😆. “Of course it’s wet. It’s water.” After some discussion and demonstrations on the picnic table and sidewalk, we decided that water is not wet because “wet” describes a liquid sticking to a solid. Since water is already a liquid, it cannot be wet.
We googled it and found that “Liquid water is not itself wet, but can make other solid materials wet.” 🤯
Finally, I attempted to “get” Molly with the Dichotomy Paradox, which basically says that in theory, you can never walk from one point to another because no matter how far you go, you always still have halfway to go. 🤷🏻♂️ Real-world experiments showed that this is obviously false in the real world but true in math. Hmm. 🤔
Anyways, it was fun goofing around talking philosophical 💩 with Molly on this beautiful spring evening.
Today I set Molly up with a new keyboard and mouse for her MacBook at the little desk in her room. She said the liked the mouse and then started typing on the keyboard. It was a little “clickier” that what she was used to.
Her face immediately lit up, and she rolled out a pretty great joke…
“Hey, Dad. What do I sound like?” she said as she clicked continually on the new, loud keyboard.
“I don’t know. A kid typing?” I said.
“No,” she said. “Any school nurse!” She giggled.
“Hey, Dad. Go outside and come back in,” she said, gesturing towards the door.
I left the room and came back in. Molly greeted me as a nurse. “What is bothering you today, honey?” she said as she continued to type loudly, still staring at the screen. I told her I had scraped my knee.
“Okay, let me see what we can do about that”. Molly opened her web browser to type something in.
Then she whispered to me, “Dad, look what I’m searching.”
She had typed in the Google search field, “what is a nurse?” 🤦🏻♂️😂
Molly has a surprising new form of entertainment while I drive her around in the car. She is doing a math self-assessment. For fun! Her idea, I swear! And this from a girl who was doing extra math tutoring just last year! You have no idea how happy this makes a dad.
Specifically, Molly is doing the official State of Texas 3rd grade math assessment practice workbook. It’s an old copy that she inherited from Claire.
Occasionally as we drive around, Molly will ask me to check her math.
Molly: “Dad, what’s 18 plus 7?”
Me: “I think you probably know that one. Do you have a guess?”
Molly: “Mmmmm… 25?”
Me: “Yep. Well played!”
I asked Molly what she enjoys about doing math for fun, and she just says, “I dunno. I just like it.” She did tell me me she does sometimes get frustrated by multi-step questions. I told her a little challenge can be a good thing. She nodded and kept plugging away at the workbook.
How this happened, I do not know. I guess the math tutoring worked! 🤷🏻♂️
Molly showed a cool magic trick — oops, I mean science experiment — to her class for “Scientist of the Week” today. Molly got to choose her own experiment. She didn’t like any of the experiments from the standard class books because they “don’t have useful conclusion”. She found an experiment she liked roughly relating to air pressure in a random kid’s science book that I had.
As you can see in the picture, she turns a cup of water upside down, and a playing card miraculously holds the water in the cup.
The class was pretty impressed and had lots of questions. “es this work with orange juice?”, “Does it work with sparkling water?”, “Do you have to use a card, or can I use my iPad?”, “Does it work on a lower value card?” To test the last question, we tried the experiment on a second card of lower value (2 of spades) to make sure it still worked. What do you know, it worked!? 😉
You got a love those curious third grade minds! And way to go Molly for a great presentation.
We discovered some goats at the school down the street. They’re so friendly and cute! They’re basically vegetarian dogs. Now we walk over and visit them form time to time.
Claire had a major role in the 5th grade musical play the year.
She was a flapper and got a brief solo singing part! She sounded amazing and looked great in her flapper outfit. She’s a natural flapper. Way to go, Claire!
Here’s Claire with her friends Susie, Wolfie, and another girl whose name I forgot. (oops!)