Carter has had a science bug most of his life. I’ll take a bunch of credit for that, given my background and the background of my father (chemist) and grandfather (chemist/physicist). We were also suckered, er, sold on getting a bunch of science books for the boy when a door-to-door salesman with charm (minus the Duke U. affiliation) showed up and dissed Dr. Suess. As it turned out, the books were a hit. They still are. His 6th birthday was devoted to being a Mad Scientist with his friends (), and we just spent an afternoon at DePauw University recently watching my former physics professor do a bunch of Physics 101 experiments with him.
So, my eldest excitedly ran up stairs after my morning hug today to grab his Safari Talking Microscope. At one point, he quizzed me.
“Dad, did you know Daddy Longlegs are not spiders? They’re beetles.”
No, I think they are arachnids. They have eight legs.
“No, Dad …,” he says excitedly. “The Talking Microscope says they aren’t. Listen …”
Carter adeptly punches a few buttons — he misplaced all of the slides, so he just started entering different combinations of codes to get the machine to tell him different things — and turns a dial. Its says:
“Hi, are you ready to learn about bugs?”
“Daddy longlegs hide in treeholes.”
“Daddy longlegs eat rotting plants and live insects.”
“Daddy longlegs legs wiggle when they fall off.”
“Daddy longlegs are not spiders.”
I didn’t know that. Turns out, it’s true. Forgetting for a moment that he’s got GeoSafari feeding him with facts, it was pretty cool to have him go on his own to a completely external source and come up with something I didn’t already know. I’m sure there are a lot of opportunities for that to happen in the future (perhaps to an annoying degree), but for now I am revelling in this little milestone.