| | Unsubstantiated(able) Claim (high bias):
My son is the smartest toddler I've ever met.
De-centering Qualification:
Except that he's not potty-trained.
Hyper-hyphenated Sentence of Support:
His almost-three-year-old's social-linguistic-skill-set-competencies astound.
Anecdotal Evidence (One):
While playing with a plastic gorilla in the tub, he dropped it and then scrambled to find it. After a while he held it up to me and said, "I didn't realize that it was beneath me."
I don't think I've ever used the word "beneath" around him, aside from singing it in verse 8 of St. Patrick's Breastplate at church most Sundays.
Anecdotal Evidence (Two):
While playing, I told him I was going to build a bridge and began standing blocks up longways. Eliot looked at what I was doing and said, "You can't build a bridge like that." I said that I could and kept at it. Eliot watched, until he apparently became exasperated at my audacity and said, "You can't be serious, Dad."
This is not a turn of phrase that Abby or I use at all, and I don't specifically remember it coming up in "The Incredibles," which is a serious influence in our household.
Conclusion:
My son impresses me on a regular basis.
Addendum:
For anyone who looks at these and asks "Who cares?" I feel that. Parents are easily impressed by their own flesh, much in the same way anyone might be impressed if they engineered a robot that could complete the simplest tasks with a substandard degree of competence, like walking clunkily around a room without bumping into anything. This isn't to undermine the parental pride of watching a child develop and grow, just to put it in context. There's nothing wrong with folks other than the parents not caring about a child's development, but through the parents' eyes a child's increasingly humanoid accomplishments delight and surprise primarily because of their simplicity. Just watching Eliot play in a wading pool unassisted used to be enough to lump my throat with a weird pride. He is me, but quickly becoming more and more him.
The joy of recognizing both strong bonds and total difference surpasses all understanding. That joy roots itself in God's creative joy, where He delights to put Himself into the world, and yet make that world separate from Himself. Where He can revel in the tensions between Him and not-Him, and feel pride in our smallest accomplishments and changes.
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| | Posted 8/15/2007 10:45 PM - 90 Views - 18 eProps - 11 comments
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