Tuesday, June 28, 2011

The Mind of a Child

Once again my four year old son's brain is working overtime.  He walked into my bathroom this morning and announced he was going to start wearing 'oderant'.  He put some of his dad's 'oderant' on over his t-shirt.  Then while I was peeing he asked, "Mom why do you pee sitting down?"  I told him that all girls pee sitting down.  Then he asked, "Well does your friend Amy from Las Vegas pee sitting down?"  I told him that yes in fact she does.  As if we are the only two people on the planet that pee sitting down.

While on the way to town today he asked if rocket ships can fly to heaven. I told them they could not but they could fly to space which would be very interesting to see.  The questions continued on and on.  I've realized this summer I am already exhausted by the questions from all of my children yet I continue to try my best to answer every one of them.  Then I try to hide in my bathroom or outside so I can get some quiet.  Sometimes I just like to be alone with my own thoughts.

However, being alone with my own thoughts can be sort of exhausting too.  I started wondering why adults can't be more like children in the sense that we should always be eager to learn.  We should want to learn new things, learn about people, learn about our environment and our country.  We may be more understanding and more patient if we took the time to listen and learn.  That's what children do, they absorb everything we do and say and they want to continue to learn more.  I remember on the last day or so of sixth grade our elementary principal came into our room to give us a speech.  If I remember right the speech was about leaving elementary school and venturing off into the junior high/high school in the fall.  She said that we were like little Pac-men just gobbling up information.  I still think about that speech because the way she said it was funny and well, it made sense.  We should always want to be gobbling up information to better ourselves as people, parents, friends, employees etc.

As adults we should start asking the hard questions and looking for the answers.  I've also decided that when my kids ask me questions I do not know the answers too we'll look it up together.  For instance, my oldest son wanted a pet hawk and even though I did not want to let him get a pet hawk I told him we'd research it on the Internet.  Well we found out that it's actually illegal to own a pet hawk in the state of Iowa.  See we are learning new things every day!  :)

You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives.  ~Clay P. Bedford

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