What is going on in those little heads?

It is amazing to watch and listen to your children as they grow and learn. I am constantly surprised at the questions that seem to come out of nowhere, the words they pick up, and sometimes embarrassed to hear something I don't like, and realize they probably heard that from me. I love that you can actually see in their faces the moment that they figure something out. Like a toddler throwing a ball forward for the first time, or a kindergartener realizing that numbers go in patterns, and that they can count to a million if they want to.

I love listening in to my kids' conversations. If you listen to the way they talk, they sound like grow-ups, but if you listen to what they say sometimes it's just hilarious. :) The other day in the car Princess had a conversation with little Bear that went something like this:

Princess: At recess you can yell, and scream, and run, but you can't do that in class or you have to go to the principal's office, and that's not fun.
Bear: Why?
Princess: There's no suckers there or anything.
Bear: No treats?
Princess: No treats, and no toys. She just talks, and you talk, and you can't play at all. Not even with your hair. Not even with your "ctr" ring. If you brought a ctr ring.

At this point, her description was so vivid that I had to interrupt to ask if she had been to see the principal... she assures me she has not.

I also love trying to figure out what some of their words are supposed to be. Some of them are just cute, and expected, like "ambliance". Some take a little explaining, like... ug! Brain freeze, I can't think of an example! But, you probably know what I mean--'Mom, can I have a _____?' 'A what?' 'A _____!' 'Umm...' 'You know, it's purple, and it's round...' 'Oh, you mean a _____.' 'That's what I said.'
Sometimes when B. doesn't know a word for a thing, feeling, etc, he just throws some sounds together to make a completely new word--and then is annoyed when I don't know what he's talking about. My favorite mis-pronunciations are: "stepsitute"--as in, 'We had a stepsitute bus driver today'--and, "instressting"--as in, 'I didn't know that, that's instressting'--and "dagnagonal" as in, 'Don't cut it that way! I want my sandwich dagnagonal!' I hear "instressting" and "dagnagonal" often enough that when I say it right it sounds wrong to me!

Another cute moment happened at dinner last week. Princess turned to me and asked, "Is today old?" I thought for a moment, but couldn't come up with a good answer, so I asked her what she meant. "You know, like 'the good old days'". She wasn't sure why I thought this was funny, and wanted to know what the good old days are anyway. Hopefully when she grows up she'll look back on these days as good. :)


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Of course, what I say doesn't always make sense either. Today the kids were making triangles and diamonds with their fingers, and B. thought his triangle looked like a tent, but not our tent. They wanted to know what shape our tent was. I said, "Well, I can't remember if it has 6 sides, or 8... it's either a hexagon or an octagon... *blank, questioning sort-of faces* .... um, it's kind of like a circle-y square." Oh yes, that makes a lot of sense. Our tent is a circle-y square shape! ;)