Reading: The Rules

Daddy is required to read bedtime stories.

Mum is not allowed to read stories, but is allowed to make them up (as long as she gets it right) because getting stories out of books when you COULD get them out of your HEAD is cheating. This is probably karmic revenge for my own childhood.

No-one is allowed to notice that quite a lot of the time someone is reading her OWN stories to HERSELF unless she's reading books from the These Are For Learning To Read And It's OK To Get It Wrong category, and then only sometimes.

Writing is completely impossible except when it's easy.

If any of the rules are broken, the entire alphabet can be forgotten overnight. Don't push your luck, parents.

Bits of this, bits of that

Lately we have been talking in varying levels of detail about human reproduction, evolution (I am looking for a really good illustrated tree-type diagram but haven't found what I want online yet), physical development from blastocyst to elderly dead person (the page in the Busy Bodies book about tampons has confused matters somewhat), ice crystals, salt crystals, snowflakes, the scale of the universe, geodomes AGAIN, what qualifies as an invention and what the first one was, where Nepal is and what it's like, the distribution of wealth and why I can't personally fix that fact that it's so unfair, and why you shouldn't bury all the smallest, most difficult and expensive to find or replace, Playmobil toys in 30kg of sand in the sandpit.

Oh, and the structure of the planet.