She Wants to Know

Everything. That’s what she wants to know. She, of course, being Olivia. She wants to know how everything is made and how it works and why it works and what it means.

I love this boundless need for knowledge but yes, sometimes it makes me very tired.

We’ll be sitting at the dinner table, eating peacefully (unless Alyssa’s reading aloud from one of her many, MANY ‘dinner’ books and then…um, it’s not so peaceful) and Olivia will want to know how I made whatever she’s eating.

When she’s old enough (mature enough?) to start cooking, this girl will have all kinds of recipes in her head, what with all the things I’ve told her how to cook.

She’ll be playing with a toy and ask how it was made. Tom often answer this with, “Well, you take a mold...”

And she always interrupted him with, “Dad! They’d don’t take a mold.”

Sometimes I have to be on Team Dad and gently say, “Actually, Liv, that toy really was made with a mold.”

Her incredulous look of wonder is always a delight in those moments.

Most recently she’s been wondering about gravity. How does it work? Why does it work? Is it always working? When she jumps is she defying gravity? When she holds her hand up above her head is gravity no longer working on her hand? Does gravity work when we’re swimming? How about when we’re sleeping? What makes gravity?

She wants to know everything there is to know about everything.

I love this but will admit that it gets tedious. I try so hard to listen to her stories and her questions and to answer her the best way I can in a way that she’ll understand. I haven’t yet said, “Gravity works because it works and that’s why it works.”

But I’m tempted. Sorely tempted.

Instead, I answer her questions. I listen to her stories. I pay as much attention as I can as I go back and forth between both girls as they talk and ask and tell and question and demand all evening long.

And Tom wonders why I often take solace in zombies.