For Christmas, I got Alden and Kato a book called “Q&A a Day For Kids“.

Basically, each page has a simple question at the top for the kid to answer. There are 365 questions. The cool part is, after you’ve done a year’s worth of questions, you start over again. And there is room for three years worth of answers on each page. So on any given page you can see how your answers were different between one year and the next.

Alden started out pretty much at the beginning writing in the answers to her questions. We usually “do questions” right before bed, and she actually really enjoys it. She considers her answers very carefully, and since she’s just learning to write it usually takes a while for us to get through it each night.

The questions can be very specific (what did you have for lunch) or quite broad:

Alden’s great hope for this year is that Kato still plays friends with her. That’s my great hope too. If they stop playing friends, my job is going to get a whole lot harder.

Kato, on the other hand, started out being much less enthusiastic for the project.

A lot of the time he refused to answer the questions at all – I think he felt a lot of pressure to come up with an answer, which is tricky, especially in this stage of his life, when his answer to almost anything (even, “Would you like some ice cream?”) is “NO!” Saying no to ice cream is just crazy talk.

But, when he chooses to answer, his answers can be quite revealing:

Yeah, cute, right?
Here’s Alden’s response to the same question:

Oh, and then there was this question for Kato:

And this one for Alden:

That went from cute to sickening really fast, didn’t it? AND WHERE’S THE LOVE FOR MAMA?!?! COME ON!!!

Oh, here it is:

Thanks for throwing me a bone, Alden.

The exciting thing is that just recently, Kato has decided he really likes doing questions, and has taken up the pen himself.

I am comforted to know he has one foot firmly in the world of gross materialism and the other firmly in the world of the mind.

So, needless to say, it’s a fun little bedtime ritual and the kids really love it. Part of what I like is that it’s a pretty quick project – it isn’t super involved, but is a nice check-in with the kids at the end of the (often chaotic) day. If you’re interested, you can buy the book HERE. And it’s not mandatory to start on January 1, like we did – you can pretty much pick up wherever you’d like to in the year. Go to it!