Dear Kid,

Have you ever thought about flamingos? Specifically, have you thought about pink plastic flamingos? My guess is you haven’t sufficiently contemplated, cogitated, and otherwise considered these most stationary of birds.

Don Featherstone (I did not make that up) invented the pink plastic flamingo in 1957. Featherstone created plastic flamingos after a night of creative burrito making (I may have made that part up a little).

Being the kind of mom I am, I have carefully and thoroughly researched the habits of plastic flamingos, so that you don’t have to fret about this when you take biology. Or whatever class it is that requires mastery of the lifestyles of the pink and plastic.

Plastic flamingos get their color from their diet. Conscientious owners provide pink plastic shrimp for a well-balanced, color-correct sheen to their faux feathers. I have it on good authority that plastic flamingos do not drink diet coke which is why there isn’t a diet coke shortage in the world.

Amazingly, plastic flamingos make the same sounds real flamingos make. Especially if you sit on them.

Featherstone won the Ig Nobel Prize in 1996. Yeah, I’ll be talking about that soon, because I won’t be able to help myself.

The natural habitat for pink plastic flamingos is the front lawn. You can frequently find them near garden gnomes. Their only natural predator is the runaway lawnmower.

Love, Mom

Dear Kid,

Once upon a time, there was no such thing as DNA, and if you wanted to know (for sure) who a baby’s parents were you had to be around at the birth (to identify the mom) and hope the baby resembled his or her Pa. A lot.

In 1869, DNA was invented. Once it was invented, people (and by “people” I mean braniac scientists) wanted to know what it looked like. Enter, the Great DNA Race. (Which fortunately pre-dates reality TV because it would have made really, really bad TV. And now, the scientist is thinking. Now he’s turning 4 degrees to the left to think some more. We’ll be back to more thinking after this commercial. Worse than watching golf.)

DNA is short for deoxyribonucleic acid. But you knew that.

On February 28, 1953, James D. Watson (not of the “Come here, Mr. Watson” Watsons) and Frances H.C. Crick finally figured out that the structure of DNA was a double-helix polymer, or a spiral of two DNA strands, each containing a long chain of monomer nucleotides, wound around each other. Kind of like two teenagers in love.

The discovery of DNA was very important as it allowed Watson and Crick to win the Nobel Prize in 1962. Even more importantly, it led to an entire genre of TV crime shows in which DNA analysis (done in quicktime) allowed Our Heroes to solve crimes that would otherwise languish in the cold case files (which fortunately is another TV show so they won’t languish too long).

I’m pretty sure other good things happened on February 28th as well. (Grin. Happy Anniversary, Darling Hubby who doesn’t read my blog.)

Hope your day is fabulous, kiddo. Can’t wait to see you tonight.

Love, Mom

Want to celebrate? Share DearKidLoveMom with someone important!