Questions From a 3 Year Old
Categories: For an update on Calfgrit3′s injury: he’s healing up nicely. It’s really astonishing how quickly kids heal. His black eye is really just a shadow of what it was the couple days after the fall, and there’s been no lasting effect.
Now, while on the subject of Calfgrit3, he’s been asking some interesting questions lately:
“Why don’t earthworms have eyes?”
“Why does water put out fires?”
“Why is the microwave not hot?”
“Why do we read books before nap and bedtime?”
I remember when Calfgrit7 was 3 years old — he asked similarly difficult to answer questions. The only specific one I remember from him is: “Why is the sky blue?”
Notice the common theme to these questions? “Why”. Every question from a 3 year old revolves around “Why?” They don’t ask, “Where does the sun go at night?”, they ask, “Why is nighttime dark?” I don’t know why this is, but it’s an obvious pattern.
When Calfgrit7 was still a baby, before he could talk and ask questions, I vowed to myself that I would always try to answer my children’s questions. I would never shrug them off or wave them away. But I made that promise before I really knew what kind of questions kids would ask. And before I knew how many questions they could ask in a day.
I mean, take, for example, “Why does water put out fires?” Do you know why? If you do, can you answer it in a way that a 3 year old would understand? If it was just this one question, I could research the answer and tell him before putting him to bed at night. But a 3 year old can ask a dozen questions like this just on the drive to the store.
The main reason why I remember that one question above that Calfgrit7 asked when he was 3 (“Why is the sky blue?”) is because I actually did try to answer it when he asked. I happened to know the answer to that question: Because the molecules of nitrogen in the atmosphere scatter blue light waves more than they scatter other wave lengths of light. He paused a moment, as if to consider what I said, and then said, “Why is the sky blue?” I sighed.
I now understand why parents say, “Because it is,” and “Because I said so.”
Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com
i would say worms do not have eyes so dirt doesn’t get in them when they are digging.
At last I have lived long enough to get some “understanding” from my kids, Or am I seeing “pay back” Heeheehee!
good answer brogrit
here is why water puts out fires…..
Often, the main way to extinguish a fire is to spray with water. The water has two roles:
in contact with the fire, it vaporizes, and this vapour displaces the oxygen (the volume of water vapour is 1,700 times greater than liquid water); leaving the fire with not enough combustive agent to continue, and it dies out.
the vaporization of water absorbs the heat; it cools the smoke, air, walls, objects in the room, etc., that could act as further fuel, and thus prevents one of the means that fires grow, which is by “jumping” to nearby heat/fuel sources to start new fires, which then combine.
The extinction is thus a combination of “asphyxia” and cooling. The flame itself is suppressed by asphyxia, but the cooling is the most important element to master a fire in a closed area.
Water may be accessed by pressurized fire hydrant, pumped from water sources such as lakes or rivers, delivered by tanker truck, or dropped from aircraft tankers in fighting forest fires…..
or you can just say because it’s wet.
“or you can say because it’s wet.”
But gasoline is wet, too.