I have often wondered at the wisdom my children acquire. Where do their sweet little brains go to soak up this information? Since I am a stay at home mom and my children rarely go anywhere at all without me I would LIKE to think it is all because of my superb parenting. But I doubt it. I am not a mom who uses Montessori methods in her home (at least not on purpose), I RARELY sit down and teach my kids ANYTHING. We hang out, we play, they watch me clean or come along on errands...but I don't purposefully teach anything. Of course Little Lady asks questions from time to time and I answer and sure, I try to throw in learning with the day. But it's totally casual and generally ignored like,
"Mommy I want an orange please."
"Sure. Did you know orange starts with the letter O?"
"Yup" She yells over her shoulder as she runs away.
That is the extent of my teaching. And yet somehow they still learn.
For example, this morning Little Lady is drawing at the table while I make her brothers breakfast.
"Mommy is this an E?" She asks
I walk over to her paper and sure enough she's got a bunch of E's. She has never written an E before. This is similar to the first letter she learned at about 2 and a half....one day she just wrote an H and knew what it was. She can now write several letters without any prompting at all and I didn't send her to some expensive pre-school or even a plain nursery "school" for her to learn it. I don't even home school.
She can also spell. One day while reading her Strawberry Shortcake book she asked how to spell "angel" then "cake". She can now spell both as well as the word moon and her name. Then my husband decided to put batteries in our old Word Whammer which has been laying around since Little Lady's second Christmas and has never been used. The first two words it asked her to spell were Web and Rim....she spelled them both.
And it's not just academic learning. We go to church and we pray with the kids and we have spiritual conversations between Prince Charming and I but we rarely even read bible stories to the kids. However somehow Little Lady has developed this angelic heart for the hurting and for God without a lot of prompting. After a conversation recently about how some kids don't have a mommy or daddy she has prayed daily for the "babies and kids that need us." She asks God to help us find them and today she told Prince Charming, "I'm asking God to lay the babies that need us on your heart." Apparently this kid must pick up on EVERYTHING!
She has also really been into singing to God lately. This I believe I can attribute to Sunday School though. She will make up ten minute long songs about "Pleasing the Lord, God wants you to please the Lord. Be a Trischan. Say Layme Down prayers. da da da da. Please the Lord." Tonight she took an appliance manual and sang this song "from the book" in front of the mirror for 15 minutes....naked. :o) So cute. But we don't even sing from books in our church....again...no idea.
Lancelot also seems to learn without any direct teaching. One day he just started to wave. We hadn't really worked on it...he just did it. And yesterday he started playing catch! We didn't show him. He just did it. He's 8 months old and he will "catch" the ball and throw it back! And trust me we are NOT a sporty family. This was definitely not taught!
Seriously these kids amaze me. They are beautiful and snuggly and smiley and smart and I have no clue how they got that way but I sure feel blessed that they are!
Now if only when I actually TRIED to teach them something they would do it! Like getting Little Lady to clean up her room!
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