The Little Lagomorph, age 5, was being tested for cognitive skills (turns out he’s normal, but that’s another story).
The lady asked him: “What’s something that’s heavy”
He thinks for a minute and says: “A rock”
“Very good. What’s something that’s light?”
He thinks about it. “A lamp!”
Well, he got it right.
Gotta love kid-brains.
Gotta love those moments.
My niece is two and a half. Her daddy, my brother, has been having back pain intermittently for the past 6 monthes ( a time that coincides with the birth of baby sister niece).
Recently, Daddy explained to niece that he couldn’t pick her up because his back was sore.
Niece: “when your back quits soaring, then you can pick me up”
Mental image for adults (and reason why the story keeps getting told) of Daddy’s back soaring like a kite into the sky). Niece is quite the bargainer-- though she doesn’t always think of things the way adults do.
When my daughter was about 3 and a half or 4:
We were in the car and having a nice conversation about school. At one point she asks me what math is. I told her the math she’ll learn first has to do with adding and subtracting numbers.
“Like what?” she asked.
I said “if you have 5 fingers and then have 2 more, how many fingers do you have?”
She thinks for a second “7”
“That’s adding. 5 plus 2 equals 7. Subtracting is the same but in reverse. If you have 7 fingers and get rid of 2, how many fingers do you have?”
She thinks for a second “5”
“There you go. 7 minus 2 is 5. That’s math.”
“Math is easy.”
“Some math is easy. Some math is really hard.”
“What is hard math?”
“Well,… 1 plus 4 plus 6 plus 9 plus 8 minus 4 minus 4 plus 20 minus 13…”
“STOP!”
“What?” I asked.
“You’re making my head hurt”
Funny thing; now that she’s 14 she does math in her head that makes mine hurt.
My daughter, who will be five in a couple of months, was just up in Colorado to see her grandparents; Papa and Grandma. She and I had watched a show on the geology of the Rockies recently and the segment on gold panning is apparently still fresh in her mind for when they took a drive in the mountains, she insisted they must stop and do some gold panning. They found a suitable lake (?) and Grandma poked some holes in a pie pan for her to use. She was happy just finding pretty rocks for awhile, but then grew sad at the… err… prospect of not finding any gold treasure. Suddenly PaPa had an idea. He discreetly began to salt my daughter’s gold pan with the coins from his pocket.
“PaPa look! I’ve found a nickel! PaPa look… a dime and a penny!”
To her it was all the same. Beautiful, wonderful, unexpected treasure.