Relativity

As a mama, I am pretty proud of my little monkey. I think she's pretty dang smart-- and so do my friends and family. She can point out almost every part of her body (hair, teeth, tongue, arm, nose, eyes, fingers, hand, feet, tummy, belly button, toes, knees, ears) and can point them out on her dolls and pictures while naming them. She can name a variety of animals & tell you what they say (although my mom taught her that the horse goes "cluck cluck" for galloping-- awesomesauce, mom) and if she hears an airplane outside, will instantly start searching the sky for it. She's starting to put words together to say "Mama, where are you" (mama, whereareyoooou), "what happened?" "where did she go?" "mama and papa's house" etc etc. She can kiiiinda soooorta count, though her favorite numbers are one-two-one-two-one-two. Over and over again. And if you sing reeeeal slow, she can almost do "head-shoulders-knees-and-toes"



But. I'm not crazy about it. I realize that there will ALWAYS be little kids out there who are brighter, more advanced, heck, just smarter than my little girl and I'm OK with that. There are so many mommy/baby blogs out there with parents just praising the heck out of their little ones and all I can think is seriously?! For instance. As I mentioned, I am super proud of my monster. She is a bright little girl.




But. I recently saw a video of my brother's girlfriend's sister's baby (whew that was long) singing this song, EXACTLY like this:

Rain rain, go away
Come again another day
Little Avery wants to play

Just.like.that. In perfect clear words-- no translation necessary. She is ONE MONTH older than Brooke. She can spell her name, count to 10 and get this, get this: she can sing lyrics to songs on the radio. As in, if she song starts "You are..." she can fill in, "the only exception" Yowzas, they've got a genius on their hands! And for a brief moment I was a little afraid. Maybe we aren't teaching Brooke all that we should be?




While I think my little Brooke IS bright as the sun, here are some things she's not so awesome-sauce at:
-Using spoons and forks. <--Mainly my fault as I waited too long to let her experiment, oops. She's getting better though! -Falling asleep on her own. She bedshares and needs her mama. -Sharing toys with other kids -Eating a variety of foods. This kid is one picky little girl. -She watches too.much.TV <--again, my fault. So sue me. And so in summary, I guess what I've learned recently is that it is really all RELATIVE. My kid might be good at one thing, but not so great at doing others. And it's so easy to be envious of what other kids can do, but who knows? Maybe they can't do certain things that your kid can (or as well as your kid can). I hope I manage to pass this message along to my little monster when she gets older. Then again, I have met some people (and are friends with some) who seem to do EVERYTHING right-- good grades in high school, popular, pretty, Ivy league colleges, in healthy/thriving relationships, are doctors, etc/etc so who really knows. On another, really random note here are some recent pictures of the fambam. My poor pups were TERRIFIED of the fireworks and I hadn't bought any tranquilizers for them. They hadn't needed it in the previous years, but for some reason they were terrified this year!



Fireworks = the devil


Me, the protector

Then my little bird and her dad came home and she crashed in my arms, sleeping through the madness :)