Smarty Pants

It's official. My two-year-old is smarter than me.

The most recent evidence:

• He has the entirety of Corduroy's Christmas Surprise memorized. Verbatim. And this is no short board book. It is 30 pages long and each 2-page spread has 4-8 sentences on it. And sentences like, "Corduroy looked out the window to see a crisp, sunny day and a fresh blanket of snow on the ground."


• He knows his left from his right and gets them correct 100% of the time. And if I get confused when facing him, he corrects me, confident that he is right, which he is.


• He loves fruits and vegetables. Not only do his salads have a wider variety of vegetables than mine (both of which he makes virtually by himself), but he also carefully eats every single onion I saute with the green beans after his beans are gone.

I'm sure there is more evidence, but those are the things that blew me away today. He also has figured out enough of the abstract question words to have a real conversation. A conversation two days ago in the car:

• N: I have a sticker, Mommy. See my sticker?


• S: That is a nice sticker, bud. Where did you get the sticker?


• N: At school. In my new classroom.


• S: Who gave it to you? (expecting either a random aside or maybe "my teacher")


• N: Miss Laura.


• S: That was nice. Why did she give you a sticker? (At this point I didn't figure he was following, but was bored driving home and hadn't talked to anyone all day.)


• N: (brief pause) I helped clean up the classroom.


• S: Miss Laura gave you a sticker for helping clean up the classroom?


• N: Yeah.

He also properly converted a pronoun the other day in a way that stunned both me and Joe. Joe was on speaker phone while Nicholas and I were crossing the day off on his "count down for Daddy" calendar. Nicholas tried to show it to Joe through the phone (the difference between speakerphone and Skype is a little above his paygrade) and then started pointing to things to show him.

"This is pizza. And that is school. And this is Da . . . this is you, Daddy!"

From 2011 October

I have been in awe of this little boy for a long time, but his language development is really amazing me. He works diligently on grammar and often pauses or goes back and corrects himself when he gets it wrong. He still has some trouble conjugating past tense, but he tries hard and I am impressed. Where did we get this child?

I'm just waiting for the first snowfall (in, you know, a week), when Nicholas looks outside and proclaims that we have a "fresh blanket of snow on the ground." He has already declared that he is happy because he is going to Corduroy's house at Christmas. I tried to convince him we could only pretend to go, but he is pretty determined. Anyone want to come over dressed up like a bear in overalls and make a gingerbread house?