Junior Scientist

My bro Mike mentioned in his blog that Jason has been asking questions about the United Nations, and that reminded me to write something about our Curious Jenna. Funny that she and Jason are about the same age, and both the 2nd children in the family, and both very inquisitive! Jenna's constantly asking questions. Usually I love it, but once in a while, I have to tell her to hold up a bit. Yesterday, she was supposed to be practicing piano, and she got to asking me questions. I answered a bunch, we even looked things up online, and then I said, "OK-- no more questions til your piano practicing is finished." She practiced for about 1 min and started to ask me another one! She caught herself and waited with it. :)

The last couple weeks, I've answered a bunch of questions about the moon. She's very interested in how we see the different phases, etc.

Last night's biggest question was about lightning bugs. We get LOTS of them here in early summer. She didn't realize that time frame, tho. Monday, she wanted to go out to catch lightning bugs again (since she just got brave enough to do it a few weeks ago), and Chad said, "I don't think they are out anymore."

So last night she wanted to know where lightning bugs go when we don't see them anymore. I told her I thought they lay eggs that live in the ground til next year, but that wasn't enough info. We looked it up and found out they usually live 2 years-- spending more than a year in the pupa stage. She didn't know about the egg-larva-pupa thing yet, so that brought up a bunch of questions. When she found out how short the adult actually lives, she was shocked-- "That's horrible!" :) Then I said I think that's the way many insects are-- short life span-- so we had to look other things up. Butterflies often live only around a week. Jenna was just floored.

Usually the questions are science-related, but sometimes we have gotten onto other topics-- a month ago or so I had to explain the Supreme Court-- this one was pretty involved because she didn't know much about court/judge/appeals/etc.

Oh, and yesterday, we spent a while on hurricanes. She didn't necessarily want to know what a hurricane is, she wanted to know about how they are named.