To Go Down the Rabbit Hole

It happens more often than one would expect.

It begins as a simple question such as, "Why are there ms on M&Ms?" We google the question, and while discovering the answer, we learn a whole bunch of things that we never expected, emerging hours later wondering how we got there.

Who would think that in answering that seemingly simple question, we would talk about:
- the Spanish Civil War
- the melting point of chocolate and what that has to do with a candy shell
- energy and metabolism / kilocalories
- the carcinogenic red dye scare and why M&Ms discontinued red candies even though they didn't use the dye in question
- marketing
- crushed insects in the red dye carmine / what's in food dyes
- the U.S. Military
- war / the conditions of war
- packaging for military use vs. public consumption
- corporations
- family businesses

I'm sure there's more, but that's what I can remember off the top of my head. The children with whom I was exploring this question were fully invested in the conversation. As they read about M&Ms, they asked questions, which led to more reading and more questions.

We go down the rabbit hole often, learning volumes without realizing we're learning a thing...which is why my children often shrug when asked what they learned that day. They don't have the same concept of learning that schoolchildren do. To them, what most people consider "learning something" is simply exploring interesting things. Learning to change a tire or to juggle is learning. The rest is just living.