They're learning more than we think

Often kids come out with completely unexpected statements that show just how much they are really absorbing from life, even when we aren't looking. Yesterday both my girls gave their own unique examples of this.

My goal yesterday was to wash every piece of dirty laundry in the house (and this is a huge task!), so as soon as I got dressed, I stripped and remade all the beds. L came trudging upstairs looking for me just as I was putting the comforter back on our bed. "Wow! You made your bed!", she said in obvious wonder and amazement. Even the 3-year-old has noticed that Mommy doesn't often perform that simple task.

In Kathryn's schoolwork, she is reviewing the fact that sentences start with a capital and end with a punctuation mark, usually a period. For the first time, I was supposed to dictate a sentence for her to write to see if she remembered those simple rules. The sentence I was supposed to give was "Jan hit it." So I gave the sentence, she started to write it, then covered her work saying, "Mom, don't look." When she was finished, she had written, "Jan, hit it." Well, we might as well just promote her to third grade. When I asked her why she put the comma in, she said, "It just sounded like there was a pause right there." So then we started to talk about how the comma changed it from talking about Jan to talking to Jan, which prompted her to change the period to an exclamation point. Apparently, if we're telling Jan to hit it, we may as well tell her with some excitement.