budding genius

It seems like we've had a disproportionate number of pictures of Evelyn recently (not so surprising, since she's the "baby" and she's so darn cute). But we do have another child, so this week's blog is something by way of compensation. So, we're not going to talk much about what we did the end of this week (go sledding, get the kids pictures taken, etc.). Instead, we're going to talk about Andrew.

I'm sure every parent thinks their child is a budding genius--somehow special and marked out. I don't know if any of my kids will actually turn out to be exceptional (I think we'll settle for decent human beings), but we like to think that Andrew is a pretty smart kid. (We have parent teacher conferences at his preschool later this week, so stay tuned for a more official report). Here is some of our evidence:

First, he's exceptionally good looking (he gets that from his dad). Oh, wait, that's not really evidence of intelligence, is it? (Except maybe of mine, for having the sense to marry into good genes).

He's recently started counting to one hundred (with no pauses). I didn't think much of this (after all, once you get the ten, twenty, thirty thing down, the rest of it's pretty straight-forward) until one of his preschool teachers stopped me when I came to pick him up to tell me how smart he was. And his babysitter (one day when Bubby couldn't make it) told me the same thing (for the same reason).

He's also started reading. We posted about the "Duh-kwah" (DQ) thing recently, but now it's a little more official--he can sound out most basic words: big, pig, fat, cat, rat, moon, sun, hop, pop, etc. He still gets tripped up by words with letters that aren't pronounced the way they're supposed to be. I'd forgotten what a weird language English is. Although, if any of you are interested, there is an explanation for the pronunciation issues--English spelling became codified shortly after the emergence of type, somewhere in the fifteenth century I believe. But the English language underwent the Great Vowel shift, where the pronunciation of the vowels changed--I don't think anyone really knows why--around the same time, and by the time that ended (somewhere around the end of the sixteenth or seventeenth century, depending on what source you go with), the spelling was already set in keeping with an older pronunciation.

And our final exhibit--Andrew has a real knack for thinking creatively and constructively. Grandma gave him a trio set for Christmas, and, having mastered all of the designs in the little booklets that accompanied his trios, Andrew has moved on to create his own designs. I was particularly impressed by the little menagerie he created this afternoon: the animals are (in order) a family of giraffes, an elephant, and two big cats (a tiger and a lion, I think). I especially like the elephant--I don't know if those particular ears would have occurred to me! At least the trios keep him busy.





Who knows, maybe all this stuff is common to all just-turned-four-year-olds. But since we've never had a four-year-old before, it's all new and exciting to us.