A short, happy thread for a change: I don't often talk about parenting online, because I had a really hard time with it early on for a number of reasons, but now that my son is in school, picking him up in the afternoon has become the highlight of my day.
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Yesterday, his class learned about volcanoes, so we talked about them for a bit. Today, he wanted to talk about planets, so we went through the whole solar system together. He knows Pluto is a dwarf planet & that Jupiter is a gas giant, but he didn't know moon-aliens aren't real.
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I'm continually fascinated by which things in stories he can immediately identify as being fiction, and which he isn't sure about, and which things he thinks are true but aren't. He knows talking robots aren't real, but I guess the moon is so far away he figured aliens could be?
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He was disappointed to be told there weren't any moon-aliens, but he perked up when I explained that the universe is really big and that we really don't know if aliens exist out there or not; it's just that we've never met any.
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He's learning to write at the moment, too; he comes home and asks if we can 'practice names,' which means he tells me the names of his classmates, asks me to write them out for him with the correct spelling, and then he copies them underneath. It's wholly his own system.
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Today was his first day in the school library, which has been closed for renovations until now. Each kid picked one book to borrow for home. The one he chose was My Two Blankets, a story about a refugee girl learning a new language in a new country while still loving her culture.
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I had no idea what it was about before I opened it, but we sat down to read it together at bedtime, and he loved it so much, he asked me to read it twice. The 'two blankets' are a metaphor for the two languages the protagonist speaks, so I had to teach him what a metaphor was.
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For various reasons, my son is the first child I've actually spent any real time with since *I* was a kid. I had zero idea how to engage with a baby or toddler, so I assumed for a long time that I'd be bad with his other ages, too, but... it turns out, I'm great with age 5+.
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He's learning so much so quickly, and it's captivating to watch. He remembers and notices so many things; he loves birds and planets and robots and dinosaurs, and it's incredible to realise that I never lost my childhood love of all that stuff, too, so that now we can share it.
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Anyway. I didn't really have a point with all this; I just wanted to share. There's so much ugly stuff in the world at the moment, but there are still little kids all around us learning about Neptune and volcanoes and crocodiles and asking about magic, and that's not nothing.
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