Remember when you were a young kid and you'd be out with Mom and/or Dad they'd bump into an adult friend? You'd have to stand there amusing yourself while they talked about boring stuff.

I was out recently with DD8 and we bumped into an adult I knew and her 7-year-old. We were talking about random stuff and DD joined the conversation and made meaningful contributions. I didn't realize what was going on until I noticed that the 7-year-old was bouncing around amusing herself waiting for the conversation to end.

Okay, DD8 doesn't always join in adult conversations and also has to amuse herself at times, but she does join in reasonably often.

HG+ kids really are different.

Impressive. I doubt that most adults know what a "dissident" is.

I suppose the concept is a familiar one to him...his mother is a bit of a rabble-rousing iconoclast.

Priceless, 1111! Does he know the word "inanity" yet? In our house, if someone goes off on a useless tangent, his/her interlocutor can say "inanity" to veto the rest of the conversation (err...monologue).

That's so cool re LMS, HK

DD6 was kicking around in her room, looking through toy boxes, and started playing with her barrel of monkeys. She decided they were good examples for how atoms join together to make molecules, and made the red ones nitrogen, blue ones oxygen, yellow hydrogen and carbon etc, and strung them together to make h2o and some other made-up things

Get that kid a molecule making kit! Seriously.

Yep, we're way behind the 8-ball as always but have been looking some up online!

DD8 conducted a series of "scientific" experiments on Minecraft yesterday, in creative mode.

First, she built the tallest pillar the game would allow her to build. At specific intervals along the pillar she placed trap doors. Then she spawned a creature on the topmost trap door, opened that door and each below in turn, and counted the number of doors each creature fell onto before it finally died. The results were recorded on signs posted near the top of the pillar.

She was quite affronted that the witch didn't die (it used healing potions in between doors), so DD repeated that and all subsequent experiments with a lava pool on the bottom.

The next set of experiments involved structures built of TNT, underground and above ground, sometimes filled with villagers and animals.

Heh, heh, diggin the scientific Minecraft. Glad DS7 isn't the only one with a gruesome sense of scientific humor. We've been fans of Phineas and Ferb for a while, and play a game of science gone wrong with Dr. Doofenschmirtz as the star. Typically we end up with real science... like "ooo... my Saltinator 3000 is almost ready. Ah there's the missing ingredients, 'Do It Yourself Salt', quite the bargain! OK, I'll just open the chlorine bottle... oh wait, the sodium has oil all over it, I better take that to the bath tub and wash it off first...."

Yes, it absolutely does! I would love to read her take on it!