Still Amazes Me

You would think that the third kid wouldn't amaze you like the first one did, or even the second one. You would think that you'd be all immune to the learning processes and steps in development...but you're not.

This kid shocked me twice in one week. First, he was sitting on Aunt Kathy's lap with cousin Abby and one of those DK sticker books - Dora the Explorer. These DK books give you several pages of stickers and then the rest of the book is a matching up of stickers to their shadow shapes. And they're not squares and circles, either. It's like when you cut out around people in a photo to make a collage. Abby was placing every Dora sticker next to the other Dora she had previously stuck down. Paul, on the other hand, was searching through the pages until he found the correct shape of his sticker. I didn't believe Aunt Kathy when she was telling me; I figured she was nudging him along. Nope.

Tonight, Paul wanted to dump out all the letter tiles of the Bananagrams game (oh, thank you Aunt Christi and Uncle AJ for introducing me to that fabulous game...let's organize a tournament night, okay?). Scrabble tiles, essentially. He was throwing them around and then he picks up the "A" and says "A". Yeah, well, it is the first letter of the alphabet so no big deal. I picked up a random letter and held it up to him. "What is this one?" "R", he says. Correct. "B", "H", "X", "T", "M", and so on. I did not do them in order, I promise you.

I was baffled. Still am. Where the heck did he learn this? Yes, he's watched the Letter Factory a few times, but come on...

Throw that in with the sticker weirdness and uh oh.,,I think we might have a new brand of Sharpie on our hands.