Just Add Glitter
I finally gave up on the peanut butter jars and just bought some water bottles. Initially I was planning to use “Smart Water” bottles, because they have smooth, unbeveled plastic that is just slightly thicker than most water bottles, but the smaller size had a “sport” top which I didn’t want to deal with, and the bigger size was a little ridiculous.
So I ended up going with Fuji water… figuring the thicker plastic balanced the fact that they were square rather than round, so wouldn’t roll.
I had to restock on glitter, so I figured I may as well do two different bottles. I did one bottle all in white glitter, with white sequins and white glass beads, and some silver snowflakes- a snow bottle. The other bottle I was hoping to make more colorful than I did before – some of the leftover red, plus green and gold and a bunch of the white. I used about three parts white per one part of the other colors, so I thought it would be bits of color amid white, but I miscalculated, and looking at the bottle, you can’t even tell there’s white in there. I also put little gold bells in and multicolored sequins, but I can’t see a single bell floating in there, so I’m not sure what happened. Inter-dimensional portal maybe, or I suppose it could be that there just weren’t enough bells. I’m not thrilled with the result, but my friend Kim oohed over it and called it festive (while she was not especially impressed over the white bottle, which I think turned out better) so maybe it looks all right even though it didn’t match my expectations.
One plus, I did my trick with the glue inside the cap, and with such a small hole (and no leaks this time) it actually worked. I’m sure an air bubble will develop eventually, because the glitter and sequins seem to trap some air no matter how much you stir, but for now I can’t see any.
So Ender gets two glitter bottles, and even though he can’t roll them, I think he’ll probably find them interesting to watch for small bits of time. Of the two red jars, one has a leak and the other seems to be pretty much sealed, but since I’m not sure about letting Ender mouth the dried glue, I’ll probably just keep that one on my desk.
It’s nice to have one project finished, but I’m having mini panic attacks whenever I think of how much I need to finish before the weekend. I think I’m actually on schedule, but that assumes I’ve accurately estimated how much time the rest will take, and of course, that I don’t run into any more speed bumps, leaks or air bubbles.
Which is assuming quite a lot.
Craft-Tastic
The handmade gifts for Ender aren’t going quite as well as I would have hoped.
The plan was to make three “discovery” bottles. The first, as I mentioned earlier, is a wave bottle with little sailboats inside. The second is a glitter bottle and the third is a roller/rattle made of sticks and nuts (hard to explain without photos).
I started with the glitter bottle, because theoretically it should be the easiest and I managed to collect the last of the necessary materials this weekend. I used red glitter, a bit of food dye, some sequins and plastic stars, and water with a few squirts of glycerine inside a plastic peanut butter jar. I thought I was being clever, and put the plastic stars in the inside of the cap, so when I screwed it on, it would push into the liquid and theoretically make for a smaller air bubble.
It doesn’t matter though, because apparently the peanut butter jars aren’t watertight. I followed the glue instructions, putting some glue on both surfaces, let sit for 5 minutes, then screwed the top on as tight as I could. And I will say that the bottle LOOKED fantastic, the glitter behaves in really interesting and surprising ways. And the air bubble was smaller than a pea. Unfortunately, after a few minutes I noticed that there was a small puddle of water under the jar. I squeezed the sides, and little streams of orange water shot out from a few spots under the lid.
Not awesome.
So I tried again with another peanut butter jar. This time I tested with clear water before screwing it shut, thinking maybe the glue on the inside of the lid had kept me from closing it tight, but when I squeezed the jar, water came out of the clean jar as well. So this time when I went to seal it up, I just closed the lid as tight as it would go without glue, then tipped it gently upside down and filled the rim with glue all the way round.
This worked better, one tiny spot let little droplets of water out and I could probably seal it up. But it occurred to me after that the glue isn’t exactly non-toxic, so having it in a spot that will be mouthed by my baby seems like a monumentally bad idea. Shame.
I think I’ll end up resorting to water bottles; at least I know they’re watertight. That’s on hold though until I get a chance to pick up a bottle of water… plus more glitter and sequins etc. At least I still have plenty of glycerine.
As for the sail boats, I’d finally settled on using bouncy balls as my floating center, figuring they’d be cute and easy to find. Only it turns out that bouncy balls are one of those things that are everywhere when you don’t want them, and no where when you do. I found bouncy balls that were too big, too small, or too hard, but not a single pack of the stereotypical bouncy balls you think of in quarter machines (and the quarter machines just had candy and other cheap toys). I finally tracked down some cute striped balls from Target, only to get them home and find they sank right to the bottom of the water. No help.
I eventually settled on some translucent (I wanted opaque) balls that were about half as big as I would have liked. Fortunately they, like the test ball, floated on water and sank in oil, so I was set there. I was able to cut them in half with only a little bit of trial and error, so I’m ready now to put the sails on, and weight the bottoms so they won’t tip. I’m worried that because they’re so small they won’t stay afloat with the sails and anchors, but we’ll have to see.
The bottle of sticks is the only one that does not require a watertight container and I do have all the materials (though the jar is full of pretzels at the moment) but it will also be the most difficult to put together, so I’d prefer to have at least one victory under my belt before starting.
Christmas is frighteningly close however, so I might just have to jump right in and make sure he has at least one of the discovery bottles I wanted to make for him. I do like making things unnecessarily difficult for myself.
KidsBlanks Review & Giveaway
I got an email from a company called KidsBlanks about a month ago asking me to do a review and giveaway of some of their products. This was actually kind of perfect, with ShmooCon coming up, I wanted to make Ender a “My First Shmoo” shirt with a little Shmoo dude. We’ve since decided not to go, so I won’t be making it, but I’ve got a few other things in mind.
They sent me three onesies and a receiving blanket. The onesies are black, dark blue and patterned black/white. The blanket is brown. Everything is from the Laughing Giraffe line.
All are 100% cotton which made me happy. Check the site though if that’s what you prefer, not everything is. The shirts that were intended for heat transfer seemed to mostly be cotton-poly blends, so I’m guessing there’s some trick to heat transfer that works better with polyester. I haven’t done any, so I’m not sure. The color is even and strong, and the pattern – some kind of silk screen – doesn’t seem like it will break down quickly, though only time will tell. When I first opened the package the fabric felt a bit plastic-y, but after one wash it feels just fine, soft with a smooth texture. The thickness of the fabric is satisfying, and not cheap feeling.
In terms of sizing, I asked for 12-18 month sizes, and they seem to be about right. They fit Ender in the body ok right now (he’s a big boy) with plenty of room in the head. This seems to be about in line with his other onesie sizes… they may be a tiny bit shorter in length, but it’s hard to tell for sure because 1) Ender grows so fast and 2) baby clothes sizes are all over the place.
One criticism I have of the website is that prices are not clearly displayed anywhere. Now, KidsBlanks is a wholesaler, so maybe there’s a good reason for this, maybe the prices fluctuate so showing a price isn’t really possible, but as a buyer, I will say that when I go to a website without obviously stated prices, I’m not going to bother. In this case, all you have to do to get a pricelist is register.
I haven’t done anything with the onesies yet (aside from dress Ender in them) and am not considering how well they print/paint/bleach/ etc. as part of the review both because I may not get around to crafting as soon as I’d like, and because it doesn’t seem fair to base a review of a product on how well something turns out if I’ve never tried it before with any comparable product.
I already know what I’m doing with the black onesie and the blue onesie, but I’m still chewing on some ideas for the brown blanket, and I’m a stumped on the black and white damask print onesie. Matt suggested painting flames on the front and I was thinking maybe a red circular Chinese dragon. I’m not really sold on anything though.
So! For the giveaway. KidsBlanks is giving the winner $25 worth of products with LG (Laughing Giraffe) or CS (tutus) labels. They say that because their products are wholesale, this is equivalent to $50. I can’t vouch for that part since I don’t know what anything costs, but the products I received are good quality, and I would use them again.
To enter:
Leave a comment with your suggestion, advice or smart-ass remark about what I should do with the damask print onesie. I will pick the comment that makes me happiest. Giveaway ends midnight New Years Day along with 2011.
Garden Drawing
It’s been a productive weekend (which isn’t necessarily all you want from a weekend, but the weekend before Christmas, necessary) so I forgot to post yesterday until I was already in bed. I’m not sure I would have had time to write anything of quality anyway.
Speaking of not having time to write anything of quality.
Here’s a drawing:
Click on image for larger version. (I recommend it, shrinking didn’t really agree with the line quality here.)
I drew this while I was pregnant. I’ve got a thing for intricate organic shapes. It’s labeled “Golden Gate: February” which I assume is the Magazine I was drawing from. I don’t have the magazine because I did my drawing in Borders. Ahhh, Borders.
Unfortunately I didn’t note down the type of flower. The drawing is done in fine tipped ball point pen and graphite (which is pretentious for pencil).
Dense
For Ender this year the plan is to make him a set of three “discovery” bottles. I originally thought it would be cool to make him one of those wave machine bottles — you know: oil, water, a bit of food coloring. It’s simple and fascinating enough that it should amuse him for at least a few years, and while he’s learning to crawl, it will double as a rolling toy.
It’s easy enough to make one with an empty soda bottle. I think think this is a pretty typical kindergarten through 3rd grade craft project slash science experiment. I wanted something a little nicer and more permanent than that, and most importantly, bigger, so I could do a couple other things on the inside.
You’d think it would be fairly easy to find a large empty plastic container, but everything shaped the way I wanted either has a lid too large, or is made of glass. Finally I decided a big plastic food container would work since I couldn’t find anything more sturdy, but I couldn’t find any with a mouth large enough. So far I am still without a container, but I think we’ll go to Costco this weekend and I think I’ll be able to find something there.
Inside the bottle, aside from the blue water and clear “air” (oil) I wanted to have a layer of pebbles on the bottom, easy enough, and a boat floating on the water. The boat is where I’m running into trouble.
I KNOW there are things that float on water and sink in oil. I remember it at least vaguely from 10th grade chemistry. What I don’t remember is what those objects are. I must admit that while I generally did well in science, density bottles were not my strong suit. In my density bottle, I added a layer of soap so even my oil and water mixed together.
My first thought was to make the boat out of a walnut shell, because everyone knows walnut shells float, right?
Walnut boats do float on the surface of water, but they float the same way a metal boat floats… based on shape. And like a metal boat, they will not rise to the surface once sunk. This is important obviously, since I can’t guarantee the boat in my wave bottle will stay upright on the surface, and once it’s sealed up, I won’t have anyway to rescue the wreckage.
That pretty much used up my imagination. I expected this to be pretty easy to find out online, but it’s remained surprisingly mysterious. I found a yahoo answers post that gave the relative densities of water and oil, which makes it completely easy because it’s so easy to find out the density of any particular object. Not that I really trust yahoo answers anyway. I also found sites suggesting that “some” plastics would float in water and sink in oil or “some” woods. So nothing simple and obvious.
I found a post somewhere that said wax would work, which seemed plausible. I didn’t think wax would make a very convincing boat though, and I was sort of stuck on the walnut shell, so I came up with the idea of filling the walnut shell with wax.
Then I came up with a brilliant alternative: crayon catamarans.
I bought two packs of crayons (so both sides of the catamaran would be the same color) jewelry wire and a whole bunch of other bits that I thought might work together with the boats, but when I sat down with oil and water and a broken black crayon… it sunk to the bottom of the water glass.
Terribly disappointing. No catamarans. Unless it was just that I used a black crayon… maybe a lighter color wouldn’t weigh as much (yes I’m joking. No need to correct my science please).
I did another google search and someone mentioned a rubber band. Obviously a rubber band won’t make a great boat but it DID give me the idea to try a bouncy ball.
And finally… a possibility.
So I have something that I know floats at the right level, now I just need to play with it some to see how I can make it look like a cute boat.
The current plan is to find a few bright colored bouncy balls, cut them in half, drill a hole through the middle and attach a sail using jewelry wire. I thought I’d use a glass bead to weigh down the bottom and make sure the sail stays pointing upwards, but I may be over-thinking this thing. For the sail I’m using a bit of fabric, and I’ll polyurethane the whole thing to keep it somewhat water safe.
I’ll post an update as soon as I figure it out.
Meanwhile, enjoy my rubber Saturn.
*First image from Flickr user Sean Rogers1. All following from me.
Six Months of Ender
Ender hit the six month mark on December 1st.
It’s pretty shocking how much a baby changes in such a short amount of time. I thought babies grew faster in the womb than at any time in their lives, but this is clearly not the case. Ender was born 7 lbs 7 oz and 19.5 inches. He doubled his weight at three months. At his six month visit he was 19 lbs 13 oz and 27 inches.
Every week seems to bring an entirely new phase.
We’ve given him “age appropriate” toys since he was a few weeks old (toys hanging from the baby gym to start) but it’s only in the last month or so that his actions have started to resemble anything recognizable as play, or that he’s been aware of objects that aren’t dangled directly in front of his eyes.
It’s true, most of his play involves trying to figure out how best to get the object of his attention into his mouth: gnaw, suck and slobber, but it’s still play.
And he is adding new exploration: he also bats and twists and bounces and pulls and pushes and grabs and throws and drops.
He smiles when you smile, he smiles when you make faces. He smiles when he first sees you in the morning or when you come back into the room a minute after leaving. He laughs when you pretend to eat his tummy, when you pretend to throw him in the air, when you pretend to throw him on the bed. When you drag him backward by his ankles, or pick him up and hold him upside down. He’ll grin at a picture of his daddy.
He can sit up by himself, though he falls without warning. He looks like he might crawl soon, but he’s not quite there yet.
He stands easily and eagerly if held by the waist, and he climbs if there’s something in front of him, usually up my shoulder. He squirms like mad, whether he’s nursing or sitting in a lap, or especially getting ready for bed. He doesn’t mind being dressed, but he doesn’t cooperate either. He loves baths, and getting Matt’s shirt all wet from splashing. He likes slapping the pictures in books and sometimes he’ll turn the page if you’re patient. He’ll sit still when Matt reads to him, but when I read to him, he tries to eat the book.
He likes to smile at strangers and show them how happy he is. People are always asking me, “Is he always like this?”
He doesn’t often sit still, but he’s happiest when he’s being held, even if he wriggles all around and won’t settle.
He is the perfect size to hug. He doesn’t hug back yet, but sometimes when he’s calm, he’ll cling around your neck and rest his head on your shoulder, and it’s almost a hug. He doesn’t give kisses yet, but he opens his mouth wide and sucks on my chin, or my cheek, and smiles while he’s doing it because it makes me laugh so hard, and the chuckles shake my whole body and him with it.
He can turn the bathroom lights on and off, but sometimes he doesn’t feel like doing it.
He will play happily by himself for as long as an hour.
He hates going down for naps, but most mornings when he wakes up, I hear him gurgling and chatting to the birds in the mobile before I get up and get him out of his crib.
He doesn’t sleep like he used to in the car, but if it’s naptime, sometimes he’ll fall asleep after long, drawn out protests. They sound like: “Uhhhhhhhhhh. Uhhh. Uhhhh. Uhhhhhhhhhh.” He doesn’t sound upset, just persistent. We think he’s saying, “I’m AWAKE. I’m AWAKE. I’m STILL AWAKE BACK HERE.” Then he falls asleep.
He has his unexpectedly fussy times, but on those long days when we fully expect him to lose it, he’s a champ. He dissolved into sobs after his six month vaccinations, and showed me that he knows how to GLARE. Fortunately, it was aimed at the nurse, not me.
He warns you with ear murdering shrieks when he’s tired and had just about enough.
He is starting to notice the cats, and they have mostly learned to stay out of reach, though they’ll tolerate him petting them for a time. He usually comes away from “petting” with a fistful of fur, but they don’t make a fuss. He likes dogs as long as they aren’t TOO eager.
He likes his stuffed bunnies and Sophie, his giraffe. (Apparently all babies like Sophie.)
He does not yet like carrots. He is traumatized by rice cereal, and unimpressed by oatmeal. Anything inedible goes directly into his mouth, but if it’s food, and it’s not produced by my breasts, he’s not interested. Actually, he’s not interested in breastmilk from a bottle either, though he’ll play with the bottle or sippy cup if given the chance.
He usually wakes up once or twice a night, but is finally starting to sleep in until 7 or 7:30 most mornings.
He likes the grocery store because there are lots of interesting things to look at, and lots of people smiling at him and telling him how cute he is.
He loves to watch other babies or other little kids and if put near them will reach out and try to touch their face.
He cries when other babies try to touch his face.
He grins at his reflection in the mirror, and at my reflection in the mirror. I say, “Who’s that? It’s Ender!” but I don’t have any idea whether he knows it’s him, or when he’s supposed to recognize that it’s him.
He isn’t sure how to react when we play peek-a-boo by covering our faces, but he SCREAMS with joy when we cover his face with a blanket or towel and pull it off so he can see again. He holds his breath when his face is briefly covered, which is a little freaky.
He likes to be held in the air, and on several occasions, has successfully dropped a drool bomb right on my eye or nose or mouth.
He loves Brown Bear, Brown Bear, even though I find the plot pretty uninspiring, and the protagonist unconvincing. The Very Hungry Caterpillar is more three dimensional, but his plight merely reminds Ender that he’s also hungry, and not interested in empathizing with someone else’s problems.
Toys that chime and squeak are fun, but crinkly things rock Ender’s world.
He may be outgrowing the play mat because when he tries to crawl, it bunches up under him and keeps him from moving.
He really wants to crawl.
Wants are much more obvious now. He reaches, he strains, he looks to me and then to whatever he’s reaching for to let me know I should give it to him. He cries when he can’t get it immediately.
In just the last few days he’s changed from aimless swimming in the air movement to pushing up on all fours. Baby development websites say he should rock back in forth in this position, but Ender bounces impatiently instead, like he’s gearing up for a race. Right now he can only stay up that way for a few seconds at a time.
Tomorrow… who knows?
All Your Fault Heather
I sign all my emails like this:
Meagan <<>>
I didn’t have a lot of friends in high school. I was the weird girl who made creepy drawings and painted all the theater sets. Looking back, I think there were more people who might have been my friends than I realized, but at the time, I felt very alienated at my school. Fortunately, there was fencing.
As of last fall, I have been fencing for half my life– I started when I was fifteen years old. It was an important time for me, I was feeling lost and a little hopeless.
Fencing was transformative. I was around adults that treated me as an equal which is of HUGE importance to a teenager. My senior year, the coach, Paul, gave me a job as an assistant teacher/coach for a home school program. It wasn’t just the extra money (and I can’t remember how much it was, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t much) it was the realization that my contribution was important, that I was actually of value. Of course there was the physical fitness aspect, I can’t claim to have ever been truly svelte, but I was healthy and athletic by the time I left for college, and my doctor told me my lung tests were good enough that he wouldn’t have known I had asthma. I gained a sense of accomplishment, with two or three placements in finals of low level national tournaments, and, the summer before college, my first ever first place finish. Thanks to the generosity and tolerance of my parents, I was able to travel all over the country for tournaments and fencing camps. In fact, that’s how I first got to see Notre Dame’s campus, frigid but beautiful in January of 1998. Fencing was probably what got me into Notre Dame too, or at least it certainly wasn’t my grades, which were decent, but not good enough for ND.
Without a doubt though, the most important thing fencing gave me was friends. My first boyfriend was a fencer, and while the dating part didn’t really work out, he was my best friend for several years. A handful of other teenaged boys in Eugene were friends to hang out with and play video games and learn calculus from. And because Eugene didn’t have many fencers that traveled to national competitions, Portland fencers stepped up as a second family, as de facto teammates, cheering me on, coaching, advising, when I ought to have been all alone.
In college, fencing launched friendships for me, teammates becoming social circles, automatic invites to parties past freshman bashes and acceptance for my quirks and many oddities.
My first female friends as a teenager were a couple fencers from Portland: Heather and Leah. Both were younger than me, Heather by a year, Leah by two or three, but perhaps because I was a bit immature, they felt like a natural peer group. With Heather and Leah for the first time since elementary school, I would frequently laugh to the point of tears, usually over incredibly stupid things that could never be explained the next day. I felt completely relaxed with them, and never felt that I had to prove anything. I ENJOYED being with them, rather than feeling that I needed to fit some persona.
Which brings me back to my email signature.
I started emailing, on my Dad’s account, when I was a junior in High School. Heather was my first correspondent. She signed her emails like this:
Heather =)
I thought that was pretty cool. I had never seen an emoticon before, and it actually took me a few emails to figure out it was supposed to be a smilie. At first I just thought it was a cool bit of graphic typography. And, in the way of teenagers, I wanted to imitate it.
I came up with: “<<>>”
It was meant as a pure aesthetic statement, and if anyone asked, I figured it looked kind of like an eye. This seemed appropriate to me, since I spent much of my time drawing eyes and some of my finished pieces had eyes as focal points. I had also kind of, but not really at all, been nick named “watcher” by a senior at my high school when I was a freshman, for my tendency to stare them to the point of discomfort if they tried to haze me. So eyes were important to me.
But yeah, mainly I just thought it looked kind of neat, and I wanted to have something cool on the end of my name like Heather did.
I continued to sign my emails that way through college, worrying a bit that it might be unprofessional, but persisting nonetheless. These days, I don’t even think about it, the <<>> is entirely automatic. On the rare occasion that I send an email that seems too serious to include it, my signature feels naked without it, and for the most part I’ve stopped excluding it, even if the email is important and to a stranger.
It has no more meaning now than it did when I was sixteen. No one has ever asked about it. Which is just as well. If they did, I’d have to admit, that I’ve been signing my emails with <<>> for 14 years for no better reason than I think it looks kind of cool.
So long for now,
Meagan <<>>
That’s Not from Our Bank
When I met Matt he worked at a bank. It was probably more exciting than it sounds. My favorite part of him working at a bank was that he had some awesome stories. He had at least a few about bank robbery attempts, but this is my favorite.
A man walks into a bank, I can’t remember which bank so let’s say Lots-o-money bank. You can substitute the bank chain of your choice. Anyway, he walks into Lots-o-money bank and grabs a deposit slip, writing on the paper: “I have a gun, put all the money in the bag, tell no one.” He then gets in line with his deposit slip/robbery note and waits. And waits. The line at Lots-o-money bank is moving too slowly for his taste.
The man isn’t picky, and there’s another bank, Matt’s bank, right across the street. So he gets out of line and crosses the street to stand in line at Matt’s bank, which is much shorter. After a few minutes he gets to the bank window and hands the teller his note/deposit slip.
Without really processing what is on the note, the teller speaks automatically, “I’m sorry sir, this deposit slip isn’t from our bank. I can’t accept this.” She hands back the note. “You need Lots-o-money bank, across the street.”
The man apologizes and accepts his robbery note back from her. Then he leaves the bank, and walks back across the street to get back in line at Lots-o-money bank.
The bank teller at Matt’s bank realizes what was written on the deposit slip as the man walks out the door. She calls the police, watching the man walk back into the Lots-o-money bank.
The man is arrested three minutes later, still in line at Lots-o-money bank.
***
And that’s why you have to wait so long in line when you go to the bank.
*First and last images from flickr users rpongsaj and Gamma Man. Second image from 401K Calculator.
Stuffing Stockings
We’re trying to make some of Ender’s gifts this year, which I hope, if we start when he’s too young to complain, we can continue on as a tradition. Most of that creative energy is going into his big gifts, but I saw a tutorial on Mox and Molly (Via Strollerderby) for some sponge bath toys that looked really easy. Well they were as easy as promised, but now that I’ve made them I’m not sure they’re small enough to fit in a stocking. I had two sponges left, so I cut them horizontally instead of vertically and made a pair of teeny ones that will fit better, and I’m sure Ender will enjoy all four sponge stars in the water.
My plan was to fill the rest of the stocking with a set of loose soft blocks, but then it occurred to me that I had a couple empty spice containers I could probably use for something.
I decided to make a pair of rattles, figuring that even though Ender is possibly nearing the end of optimal rattle age, kids don’t outgrow noise makers for much longer.
My first thought was to fill one entirely with bells. I assumed, foolishly, that it would sound like bells.
Apparently bells need a bit of space to really “ring” so this rattle didn’t sound anything at all like bells in spite of being made up entirely of bells. It did sound pretty cool though, sort of like a rain stick. It’s also super sensitive, so if you brush up against the table where it’s resting, the whole thing kind of shivers.
Listen: bells
For the second rattle, I put in a bunch of pebbles, eventually settling on about an inch for optimal sound. This gives a nice solid clunking sound. The spice top has a lid that flips up to attached holes, I think it held pepper flakes. I thought about gluing it shut, but the sound is much better with it open, so sometime in the next couple days I’ll cut it off instead and figure out someway to smooth the plastic.
Listen: rocks
So the second week of December and we’ve got 4 stocking stuffers for the price of bells and sponges. Not too bad.
I Know you have Questions
For as long as we’ve had smartphones, Matt and I have had a rule. Whenever we wonder about something, be it a simple fact, or a complicated political history, we try to look it up. Like what’s the difference between a pine tree and a conifer? What are the origins of the expression “high and dry?”
In the age of google, it just seems silly to say, “I wonder…” and not find out the answer. Sure, sometimes the only answer we find is Wikipedia, or better still, some random one off reference on a blog of questionable reliability, but even if only 70% if what we learn is true, we still know 70% more than we did before.
I think the only time I actually wrote about one of these questions was back on my old blog with the post, I promised you Dragon Sex. It wasn’t necessarily educational, but it was entertaining, and actually many of these quests for knowledge really end up being pretty entertaining exercises.
I thought it could be kind of neat to start doing this on a regular basis, blogging about the questions and the “answers” we find out. Maybe some of them will be interesting to other people, and I’ll try to skip the ones that are simple or boring.
This is, I guess, a very minor part of our lives, but I like the idea of having it be our automatic routine as Ender gets older. When he gets to his “why” stage, I want to be able to say, “I don’t know. Let’s go look it up.” I want him to grow up knowing how to find things out.