Why My Children are Smarter than Me

Musings

About a year and a half ago, my twins tore pages out of a beautiful Cinderella book that had been a gift for my daughter.  Books are precious to me and tearing pages out of them is sacrilege.   This evening my son Jacob, who was a culprit in this malicious deed remembered ripping out the pages of Cinderella and reminded me of it.  So I asked the twins, “What possessed you to tear the pages out of that book?”  To which my daughter replied, “We were making wall paper.”  Now I suddenly didn’t feel that bad about what they had done because although it never would have crossed my mind as a child or adult to make wall paper out of anything, I could see and respect the creativity of their train of thought.  But I had another question for them, one I knew would just stump them, they would have no reply and I could remain righteous in respect to, “Even if you are going to make wall paper out of your books it is still not a good idea.”

So I asked (rather smugly), “How were you possibly going to make wall paper if you had no way of sticking it to the walls?”

To which my daughter Lozen replied, “We did stick it to the walls, we licked it.”

“You licked it?!  Did it work?”  “Yup.”

I’m thirty three and in a million years I could not have come up with that answer.  I was speechless once again from the umpteenth piece of humble pie I was forced to eat.  The ironic thing is, when I was upset over them tearing up the book I could not imagine what would have motivated them to do such a thing and at the time they wouldn’t tell me.  In hindsight, they probably couldn’t understand what I was so upset about, when they had redecorated in such a lovely way!

Debbie @ October 15, 2007