I Know Stuff

The other night, I was reading with A-girl. She's been full of questions lately. Lots of them. We're on a body kick right now. Bones, blood, digestion, the brain, teeth (she has a few loose ones--her mouth is starting to resemble a shark as her new teeth can't wait for the old ones to fall out)--all that stuff is so new and fascinating to her. It's like she just realized that there is "stuff" inside her. She had no idea, apparently.

She has shared with me, several times, that there's a boy in her class that, "knows everything!" Most recently, she demonstrated a nugget of fact that he showed her, by putting both her fists together to show me how big her brain was. I knew exactly which little boy she was talking about. I've witnessed his skills first hand. He does know everything. He is a little information soaker. He soaks in the good stuff...steering clear of Spongebob, sticking to the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet. I'm sure of it.

So, I'm reading to A-girl this book about the human body. It has all these cool pictures, explanations, and fun facts. There are fun little side panels you can pull out and with cartoon outlines of the skeleton, muscles, the heart, the intestines (Did you know that if you stretched out your intestines, they would be 26 ft. long?! As tall as a house!) and so on. I love the ones that look like transparent people, wearing t-shirts and baseball hats, walking around with their insides showing. Those are the best. We gravitate towards those.

Like I said, A-girl is amazed. She had no idea! As I'm reading to her, I'm commenting about things, giving her some wow's and that's cool's. I think I liked the intestine one the best, cuz I can't believe we have all of that crammed inside us. It freaks me out a little.

Then she said something that has stuck with me. After one of my little comments, she says to me, "Mommy, you should be a teacher, so you can learn stuff." Of course I had to laugh, cuz that's funny, but it reminded me how very much I'm going to relearn over the course of my girls' school career. I know this stuff. I've heard it at some point either from one of my own teachers, or one of my own little Know It All kid in kindergarten class. It's all stashed away in some corner (or would that be fold?) of my brain. But with my kids, it's like learning it over again--fresh-like.





Right now we're deep into multiplication. My second grader loathes it. I insist how fun it is. I sing the multiplication song to her, in true School House Rock fashion. She thinks I'm crazy. I love how all those nuggets, we've learned, ooze out from back in the day. No doubt to thoroughly confuse the kids today, because half the time, they aren't even learning it the same way we did. They are actually learning to understand the why of things. But why?!

I've been saying how I'll leave the math and science homework to the hubbs, cuz they weren't faves of mine, growing up. I had tutors. Miraculously in college the math and science sunk in and I really got it. I didn't love it, but I understood it, finally. I hope it doesn't take that long for my kiddos.

I think I'll choose to look at all this new stuff my kiddos are learning as a second chance (or would that be third chance?) for me to find a love for all that is academic, as I'm trying to get them excited about it. Mom's are supposed to know everything anyway. I've got to at least look like I do.

I think I might like for other kids to go home and tell their parents what my kids taught them (the good stuff, again, not the stuff from Spongebob). I would love for my kiddos to question things and yearn to discover the answers all their lives--to keep this kindergarten/second grade excitement for learning all along. I want them, at the tender age of 35, to still get excited and grossed out, all at the same time, to learn that their intestines are as tall as a house. I want them to be teachers too, so they can learn stuff.