NL #34: Will you still have ears?

NL #34: When Ann's colleague Thomas told her two year-old daugher India that Thomas would be getting her hair dyed a different color, but she would still be the same person, India adopted her mother's serious tone, thought about it, and asked, "Will you still have ears?"

One of the fun things about teaching--and probably about parenting--is watching children think and just trying to imagine what's going on in their heads when they meet new ideas. When Ann, frustrated with one of her freshman students who was surfing the internet instead of working on his math, told him she was bending over backwards to help him learn, he looked disturbed and whispered to himself, increduously, "Bending over backwards?"

After my surgery, I did an administrative internship in a high school and took a zero-gravity chair into my office so that I could take a nap there when I needed to. The one day I did take a nap, upperclassmen were leading tours of the new school for freshmen. I heard a group outside my door, then a series of teenage boy voices. "She is out" and "She is totally out." I opened an eye to see three stacked heads at the rectangular window in my door. Note to self: cover that little window in the future. I pretended to keep sleeping, but it was hard not to laugh.

When my niece Isabella was two years old and  her younger brother Jack was a one year-old, Isabella saw a picture of herself as a baby and said, "That's Jack." My sister Jenn replied, "No, that's you." Isabella thought about this for a while and then said, "That's amazing." That is amazing. It's good to be reminded.

Ann and I got married last summer and our nieces and nephews were all part of the wedding. A month or so before the wedding,  my niece Lucie was sitting in the back seat of a car with her friend and told her friend, "My aunt Mary and my aunt Ann are getting married, and they're both girls." Her friend gasped: "They're going to have a lot of babies."

If you're a young parent, please start writing these gems down. Such wisdom might be helpful to our congress. They're desperate for the wisdom of young minds.

Mary