Honest Abe

The simple answer is that he was honest and people called him Abe.

There is a rich history of President Lincoln being honest in his personal and professional life.  He would return customers money with great effort if a mistake was made at the till. He believed that it was important to act with integrity in his law career and his actions made him a sought after arbiter and judge.  One thing we found interesting was that if he did not believe something was right – he did not have a gameface and coud not argue for those things he believed were wrong.  His enemies were even found to proclaim his honesty.

We are learning new words in our research and two good ones tonight were integrity and legislature.

We also had some discussion about President Lincoln and the civil war which was a topic in school this year.  The main thing J remembered was that the war was the bloodiest in our history, the north and south fought and that President Lincoln freed the slaves (with the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1,1863).  Answers certainly stimulate more questions.  We could spend a great deal of time on Lincoln and the civil war. Maybe we will return to this topic.

The most helpful post was http://www.greatamericanhistory.net/honesty.htm

The questions are far outpacing the answers

We were away camping for the weekend, and I realized that the questions will outnumber the answers.  I think that is the case all the time.  Answers beget more questions in life.

Some questions from the weekend:

• Why was President Lincoln called “honest abe”?
• Why is Killens Pond called that?
• How do eyeglasses work?
• There was a lot of serious thought about campfires and color and ignition – we will need to explore fire?

Some questions from the garden:

• Why do some weeds have stickers on them?
• What do the different smells of weeds / flowers mean or why are they different?
• and  – what are we going to do with all that zucchini!

J & I are going to need to pick our favorite questions to answer.  Hope to be back shortly with some answers.

Why can’t dogs eat chocolate?

We learned by visiting a few websites, that chocolate has theobromine and caffeine.  Both of these substances are bad for dogs. Dogs cannot digest theobromine and it is a diuretic which potentially causes vomiting, diarrhea, rapid heart beat and seizures – none of which are good for dogs and if extreme, it can be fatal.

We read about theobromine on Wikipedia and it was a bit advanced for us – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theobromine – but if you are interested see the entry.

Fun Q & A goes live!

Our Blog mascot -Yoda

J & I are excited to be off on our adventure of curiosity.  J is always asking questions and I do not always have the answers – so we have decided to seek the answers together and blog about the experience here.  We hope to learn a bunch and have a ton of Fun!

Our current top 3 questions for which we will be seeking answers are:

1. How come dogs cannot eat chocolate, what is it that makes them sick?
2. How many planets are in our solar system? (with planet x being known and Pluto being decommissioned as a planet I wasn’t quite sure of the precise answer)
3. What are the YMCA swimming ranks and what do you have to do to earn them?  He’s really interested in Shark rank.
4. one more what’s the longest word in the English language and what does it mean?

These are his questions of the past week that I could not answer…so off to do some research and we will report back on the answers and the process.