Dinner conversation tonight:
Griffin: “In a way, we do have superpowers.”
Sarah: “How so?”
Griffin: “We can communicate. And we can love. And we have emotions.”
Sarah: “That’s very wise.”
Griffin: <…thinking…> “But, if everyone has a superpower, then I guess it’s not really super after all.”
“I am definitely going to go to college. When you finish your classes, you can just walk around, ride your bike, hang out with your friends. . . it’s like recess all the time!” — Griffin
During dinner last night, we were discussing how messy babies are when they eat. In my customarily ridiculous fashion, I proposed that high chairs should be built inside large tubs. All the food detritus would fall into the tub. Then at the end of the meal, you pull a lever and a huge bucket of water dumps on baby, high chair, and tub, washing all the sticky, gooey, crumblies away. We laughed about this, agreeing that one of many problems with my proposal, was that the sudden deluge would be scary for the hapless filth monger in the midst of it.
I tried proposing heated dryers, but Griffin didn’t think that this would be enough. He suggested putting an umbrella over the baby. But this, I countered, would only clean the area around the high chair, without cleaning the baby himself (we were imagining Oliver as our first beneficiary). Griffin considered this, and responded, “What if we put some sort of water resistor over him?” I shook my head, misunderstanding, and pointed out that we need the baby to get wet. Griffin, in turn, shook his head, saying, “No, a water resistor.” I still didn’t get it, thinking he meant some sort of anti-water-force-field. He elaborated, “You know … an electrical resister doesn’t stop the electricity, it just kind of slows it down. So a water resistor would be like that, making it less strong.”
My jaw dropped. My nine-year-old just schooled me on electrical engineering, using the idea of a electrical resistance as a metaphor.
Patent pending.
Tonight I asked Griffin if he’s been keeping track of his screen-time minutes (a thing we do).
He replied, “I thought you said that we’d do it by sound.”
“By … sound?”
“Yes, last night you said that we would do it by sound,” he repeated, looking entirely earnest.
<Puzzled thought.> “Ohhhh… I said we would play it by ear!”
Love the way brains grapple with new idioms.
While working on a project yesterday, Sarah became justifiably frustrated that the kids were goofing off and not following directions. At some point, she blurted out, “You’re being so inefficient!”
Griffin replied, “We’re kids. We’re not supposed to be efficient.”
Zing!
I love the little tidbits that the kids come up with as they engage more with the world. At a recent meal, Griffin noted that the word because is spelled one way, but is often spoken a different way: ’cause. He knew that he should spell out the full word in writing, but he wondered what he should do if he were writing the words that someone else said (i.e., quoted dialogue). This led to a great conversation about written dialogue and how the conventions of writing don’t always match the conventions of speech.
This would have been a great discussion topic in English workshop with 8th graders, so it was a real treat to have it spontaneously emerge from our 3rd grader’s ever-curious mind.
This is Griffin’s first stop-motion animated short feature. In the director’s words:
This is based on my magnets and I’m really into space so I wanted to make this movie just for everyone.
Griffin was so excited after making this that he now says he wants to be a “movie maker” when he grows up.
Griffin, upon passing plastic statues of Mary and Joseph in a nativity scene:
“Are those carved from butter?”
We were utterly befuddled until we remembered the popular booth at the state fair where they carve the head of Princess Kay of the Milky Way into a 90 pound block of butter.
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Griffin, while reading some product packaging at the dinner table:
What’s a G-M-O?
Goofy … Mohawk … Ogre?
I like the way this guy thinks.
Not to be outdone by his sister’s creation myth (see my previous post), Griffin shared his own version:
This is my way that the Earth was made. There was a big explosion in space that made a big huge rock and then it melted into lava and then it kept on cooling and cooling. And rain came and then grass started growing and little particles in the water came and the particles got bigger and bigger. Some were in water, and some were on land. And the ones on land were dinosaurs. and the ones in water were kinds of fish. And that’s how the Earth was made.
I think he intended to say a bit more, but he became fatigued with the telling and decided to wrap it up. I may check in soon about a possible sequel.
