Dalia watches the eyeball

I took my daughter to the Exploratorium in San Francisco on our trip out there last week. It wasn’t just a way to fill a morning. It was kind of a pilgrimage, since I used to go there when I was living with my dad in California, in the glorious 1980s, when the Golden State was on a break from Republican actor-governors and the 49ers were thrashing the Saints, making Who Dat Nation wear paper bags over their heads.

I’m just old enough that it’s not easy to find places that are still around from my childhood, so I was glad to find that the Exploratorium is essentially the same jumble of magnetized black sand and smoke tornadoes and infrared lights and other scientific gewgaws that it always was.

Dalia, a couple days shy of her fourth birthday, loved all that physics stuff. I did not expect that she would be as thrilled by the biology exhibits. Biology can be a goopy thing, and I thought she’d be a bit too young for the so-gross-it’s-cool appeal.

Some of it solved itself: she was too short to see into the terrarium filled with decomposing rats. But she sidled right up to the stainless steel dissection table, just as the orange-vested volunteer was bringing out a sacrificial cow’s eyeball. My stepmom and I asked if she really wanted to watch it, but she was totally transfixed. Yes, she had a few meandering questions about what had happened to the cow, but otherwise she was geeking out on the gels and films and various mushes inside the oversized eyeball. I mean, she’s already sort of fixated on death. Now she’s obviously ready to get some learning out of it.

I was reminded of her unexpected gameness for dissection by this great review at DadList, who looked at the seriously cool Fifty Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do), a new book of projects for kids by Gever Tulley, founder of The Tinkering School.

I haven’t read the book, but I’m pretty sure it’s awesome, because it sent risk-averse publishers fleeing and some people in Australia even want it banned. It’s a remedy to over-protective parenting, with activities ranging from supergluing your fingers together to climbing trees to licking a 9-volt battery. They come with project-specific disclaimers like Frustration or Property Damage.

But really, the projects are all things that your kids are going to whether you want them to or not; so you might as well do it with them, show them how to do it right, and get some learning in while you’re at it. Fantastic. Thank you, DadList, for bringing the good stuff.