Aidan At 8

Unless you are delusional your kids intelligence is almost always more advanced than your perception of their intelligence. You keep having these little epiphanies. A few recent ones, one for each kid. Elisa watching the snake show in Phuket and listening to the snake shaman tell a long and winding store about another snake shaman. The story was told in a thai english accent and went on for a bit. That night at dinner Elisa told Yang about the snake shaman who died because he drank alcohol before riding his motorcycle home (strongly this was a joke, as in the shaman didn’t die from the snake byte). I had no idea that Elisa could follow or understand such a long story in English. For Lydia, the epiphanies for me most often come up when seeing how she builds her crafts, mostly drawings. For some time now, she has clear ideas about what she wants to draw our build and recently has been able to do more of this herself including a book of cat drawings she made last week. With Aidan, in the past month I’ve noticed he’s making some new cognitive leaps and is using more analogies which I hadn’t noticed before.

Aidan and I took a 15 minute elephant ride, it consisted of walking up a fairly steep trail, stopping for a minute so the elephant jockey could try and sell us some junk jewelry, and then walking down the hill. On the way up I asked Aidan if elephants like people. “No.”  Why not?” “Because we ride on their back.”

He’s also been making analogies, in response to questions like which of these two TV shows do you like better saying “it’s like baskin robbins and cold stone, both good”.

While we also know he has a bit of a sneaky side to him, Aidan is also very responsible and listens to us. We recently instituted a no computer game moratorium during the week which was hard on Aidan because for the past year he’s been used to playing games at least an hour a day. But he understood why we did it and didn’t fuss (too much) about it. He just kept asking if today was Friday.

So at 8, we fine Aidan firmly a boy albeit a bit of a mommies' boy, with a rapidly growing mind and a well defined personality. Serious often, with a bit mischievous side and caring for his siblings. At can’t wait to see what the next year will bring.

A couple of pictures from Aidan’s birthday – his cake and nerf guns.