Curtains

Calvin and Henry woke up early this morning and went downstairs to yell and throw things play with blocks until the rest of us felt like greeting the day. We heard them playing and being violent shouting and giggling like it was their job or something.

I went down to try to catch a few more zz's on the couch be with them, and neither of them said anything to me, just continued their playing. But David wasn't even down the stairs this morning when Calvin met him first thing with this bit of informational analysis:

"Dad, did you know there are two kinds of stages? There's the kind of stage that you do a play on, and there's pupa stages."

I don't think the boy's brain ever turns off. He's always processing, even when he just woke up or is in the middle of playing wildly with his brother. And I can't figure out who's telling him about stuff like pupa stages. Seriously.

He just seems to soak stuff up, ideas that I guess aren't new to me anymore, but they strike him, and then it occurs to me that he's seeing or noticing everything for the first time around. This is one of my favorite drawings that he's made lately:



The green circles at the bottom are people in a theatre, watching a movie. The movie is about a big orange man. The green and red stripes are the curtain going up so that the people can see what's on the screen.

The greatest show on earth is watching how my kids' minds and ideas and personalities take shape, what they think about and what they see. Their learning is becoming almost completely independent of me, and creative and interesting in ways that I could never orchestrate. They are insatiable in their curiosity and have such a capacity to take it all in. The curtain never goes down - it's always going up, I think - on their appreciation and understanding of the world. And I can't get enough.

Even when I'd love to catch a few more zz's on the couch.