unschooling lesson 1

in the car on the way home from the zoo:
- Mama, I'm the little baby monkey with the orange hair, and you are the black mama monkey...
- Ok... would you like a slice of dried mango?
- Do monkeys like dried mango?

i must confess that up until now, when faced with the buckets of questions regularly and casually emptied over my head by my favourite girl, i have tended to answer, at random, one of the following:
'of course they do!'
'of course they don't!'
'i don't know... what do you think?' (and then not listen to the answer...)

but now there is unschooling. and i am learning all the time. so i thought about it, and figured that they probably do. like dried mango slices.

- Mama, my favourite colour is pink. do monkeys like pink too?
- ...i don't know. i don't know that monkeys know about colour. but i'll tell you what: we can find out...

(in case you're interested, it turns out that our monkey is Old World, which means it can probably see pink. if it had been New World, however, it would probably only be able to see blues and greens, unless it was a night monkey, in which case, it would have had black and white vision) (incidentally, this sheds no light (of any colour) on the question of whether this particular monkey liked pink)