Everyone has heard of this phase: a child learns that "why", as a question, basically always makes sense, and they explode with curiosity. I have been waiting for it for years.

It's finally here.

In the past days, Olive has learned things like why we put socks on one after the other (we don't have enough hands to do them simultaneously), why we have to go to sleep at night (we get very cranky if we don't sleep at all, and we're busy during the day), why are we cutting this pumpkin (we're turning it into a Jack O'Lantern for Halloween!). She's asked predecessor and follow-up questions to all of these, and gotten answers. So far, she's always given up before I have.

Without being too egoistic, I think I'm pretty good at answering this kind of question. It's fun! Explaining the basics of life, society, and the world at a level she can understand is an exercise in spontaneous generation of specific answers to broad questions, at a level that she can understand. It's stretching mental muscles which I don't often have need to use.

Another thing that's been going really well recently is following up: recently, when I explain something complicated to Olive, I've been asking her if she understands. If she does, then great! Otherwise, it's an opportunity to try again, to explain better. It's easy enough to do, and she really seems to enjoy it.

A long time ago, I thought that I'd delight in telling her inventive fictions. Somewhat to my surprise, I've discovered that I have no appetite for that sort of thing, for now at least. The problem is that Olive doesn't yet have a complete mental model of the world; she wouldn't register strangeness as something to call out and laugh at; she'd just acept it. She's far too credulous for it to be any fun to tell her any semi-plausible lies.

She and I read Wacky Wednesday¹ for the first time a few days ago, and it was striking the degree to which she just didn't get it. Even knowing that there are 20 wacky things on a page, she had a really hard time identifying what in the image was weird; it was only after I pointed out that a policeman had three legs, for example, or a window was floating isolated in the air, that she'd realize that it was wrong. Then, on the next page, with similar strangeness depicted, she was still uncertain: "Help me, Daddy."²

I must have known at some point, but at this remove, I can only wonder what it is like to have that worldview. There are constants, like the love of family and the joy of play, but the wider world remains largely unknown to her. If we got into a rocket and flew to the moon, she'd have fun bouncing around, but she wouldn't be fundamentally startled by it; it would just be one of many fun vacation things that we sometimes do.

As she grows, she'll evolve a broader, deeper, and more accurate worldview, of course. It's appropriate, and good, and inevitable that the uncertainty will be replaced with knowledge, and that in time she'll be able to spot absurdity in an instant. Still, it would be fascinating to visit her model of the world for a while; it must feel magical.