![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
But I open the pane and pop out the flame just to see how the wind do blow
My niece was fascinated by the lobsters in their tanks at Fresh Pond Seafood. We had just picked up our order to go when a shipment of fresh lobsters arrived on ice. Instantly she did not want to leave; she wanted to watch them transferred into the tanks, she stepped up onto the low wooden rim of the flower bed out front of the store to get a better look into the crates in the back of the truck; when I explained what was going on, the lobster/deliveryman took one off the top of the ice and offered it for her to hold. She wasn't quite comfortable taking it herself, but she petted its cold shell when I held it and watched its antennae move and there was a slight mishap handing it back to the man, but I confirmed afterward that the lobster was fine. I am not sure she understands entirely that crustaceans in tanks, when encountered in a fish market, are not pets after the fashion of Gérard de Nerval, but she was so excited about them—she named several while we were waiting and declared an enormous blue one their leader, causing me to imagine a jailbreak or heist—and I love that the older man making the delivery responded to her enthusiasm in kind. Then we went home and ate fried clams and shrimp and rewatched the first hour of Ponyo (2008), after which it was bedtime just as Ponyo finished her ramen and passed out. Next week we are planning to take her to the sea.
no subject
Children are very strange. I suspect she realises at some levels that clams and shrimp were once living, but they don't always connect the dots.
My seven- year old granddaughter makes comets out of pieces of wool, and they have amazing adventures while living in a clamshell at the bottom of the sea.
She also chats astrophysics with her grandad and is perfectly aware that real comets are balls of icy rock, but it still doesn't stop her play ones having babies....
no subject
I believe I have the album it comes from courtesy of
I suspect she realises at some levels that clams and shrimp were once living, but they don't always connect the dots.
From the way she talks about it, she seems to have made the connection between some foods and animals, but not yet others. She understands that I can threaten the rabbits that wreck my mother's garden with being turned into hasenpfeffer, and she likes when I sing the fried shrimp song (it bobs through the depths of the ocean, serenely boasting of its existence untroubled by whales, until the small child engulfs it), but where hot dogs come from is still a mystery.
She also chats astrophysics with her grandad and is perfectly aware that real comets are balls of icy rock, but it still doesn't stop her play ones having babies....
That sounds completely reasonable to me.
no subject
no subject
(a) I was three and a half when my brother was born; I nursed my stuffed Snoopy in imitation of my mother.
(b) That's adorable!