Mucilage

Do you know what it means? Sticky, adhesive substance found in some plants. Weird.

What did I learn from this dictionary exercise? My daughter is afraid of dictionaries. Or else impatient with them. I believe she would prefer to SPEAK the word into a voice recognition device on the cover, then have the book tell her AUDIBLY what a word means.

How do I know this? She has spent the last ten minutes in a hysterical screaming fit, complaining about dictionaries and how they are "so stupid" and what a waste of time it is to look up words in dictionaries.

Did she like it when I pointed out that she has spent more time screaming than it would have taken her to look up the word in the first place? Well, then you can probably guess that she also didn't like that I insinuated that she may have trouble with dictionaries because she has not memorized alphabetical order and suggested that she just hum the tune to the ABCs while she looks up the words.