The Amazing Minds of Children

There are so many random moments when I gaze at my children and wonder, "What were you thinking?"

More often than I wish to recall, my thought has an exasperated, angry exclamation mark at the end. Those are not the most memorable to me.

The moments I love to ponder are those that are asked with a truly open and wondering mind...

What were you thinking? How did your growing and developing brain capture that thought, action or phrase?

And back to me, how do I foster and encourage more?

This afternoon Parker worked happily at writing his Valentines Day cards to his classmates. He is writing the recipient's name and his name on each card. With 18 kids and 2 teachers, that's a lot of work for a just-turned-four-year-old.

When we decided to stop for the day, he wanted to join Brady in making some Valentines Day pictures for his Great Grandmas. So off he went drawing a picture about some sort of robot who has red acid that he shoots out of his hands that makes people freeze (haven't seen that Hallmark card, yet?)

Anyway, I asked him to write "LOVE, PARKER" on the top. He decided he would rather write it on the bottom. I cautioned that perhaps it would be hard to read over the "red acid," but he persisted. Upon learning that I was correct, he reached up to the top of the paper to write the words. He had a hard time reaching the top of the paper, so he turned it upside down. Realizing that he had turned the paper upside down, he figured that he must write backwards so that the message would be legible when the paper was turned right-side-up.

I looked over at what he had done, and he clearly explained to me that because the paper was upside-down, he wrote backward so we could see it. Then he looked closer at the paper, looked puzzled, looked at me and said, "That seems funny. It's still backwards!"

He actually wrote each letter perfectly backward, from right to left. An exact mirror-image of proper writing.

To him, his reasoning was perfectly sound, and he was confused about why it didn't work as he had intended.

To me, I wondered in amazement at the open and receiving nature of his little brain. When I asked him to re-explain it to me on camera, I of course didn't get the same focused and sound response.

This picture was taken looking into the living room mirror. The picture is of Parker's reflection.


That's OK. His mind is apparently busy debating Euclidean Versus Non-Euclidean Geometry.

We'll give him a hall pass on this one.