Step back and jump ahead

You are always learning and so are your kids, but it doesn't always seem that way. And while you know this objectively, you look at your child sometimes and think that can't be right.

Recently my 4 year old spent about 4 weeks referring to everyone and everything as a "booger nugget". Those of you familiar with WebKinz may have suffered as well. I don't particularly mind the name calling. Kids call people names and booger nugget is tame. In fact, to her the name wasn't a pejorative -- just funny sounds put together.

No, the real problem was that 6 months ago she'd gone through a big growth spurt. She spoke more clearly, her vocabulary exploded and her physical coordination and manual dexterity had gone way up. (Note -- "way up" is relative. For us, if you're sniffing the 40th percentile in any physical ability you're instantly the Jesse Owens of the family.) Now, she was stuck on one phrase.

See, this happens. Your child takes a giant mental/physical/emotional leap in development which really seems to happen overnight. You marvel at this and you and your wife beam as your child uses a word like "frustrated" correctly. You pat yourself on the back that the admixture of your DNA and your wife's DNA and those educational videos (note -- none are really educational, but that's for another day) and the reading and all the rest has created a peewee Marilyn vos Savant. And you need this fantasy because otherwise you have to admit you're flailing around considering whether Strawberry Oreos count as a fruit serving. (They do not as they are actually Strawberry Milkshake Oreos.)

After a few weeks wondering whether you should call the folks at Harvard to fast track the kid's college education, you get used to their new abilities. You absorb the new vocabulary, emotional stability, and physical prowess (for us, much less unexplained falling over) and these new abilities simply become part of your internalized vision of your child. This is good because it keeps you from making an ass of yourself by actually making the call to Harvard.

After that, though, something bad happens. Your child seems to get stuck. It's like no learning is happening. Worse, you start to wonder if they're getting dumber. Questions like, "will I be reminding a 30 year old to stop what she's doing and use the goddamned bathroom," arise. This can go on for a while and you may even begin to panic and start worrying about lead in toys, what your wife ate during pregnancy and whether those college good times mutated your DNA from the building blocks of life to the Lego set of stupid.

So that's where we were. My daughter calling everyone a "booger nugget" and me wondering how in 25 years I'll explain a 4 year old in a 30 year olds body. And then it happened. Another amazing jump forward occurred and we're back to beaming.

During the quiet, rational moments you know this is how it works. The information comes in and gets parsed, categorized, indexed and arrayed but not used. It builds and builds and builds and then it seems the whole system shuts down. It's like a long reboot takes place and the system reconfigures and works more efficiently and has more and better "features".

But 4 weeks of "booger nugget" can make anyone despair.