Leaps and Bounds

Occasionally your kids say things that really make you stop and think. I'm not talking about the twee, bittersweet quips (not this time anyway) but the things they say that make you realize they are growing intellectually.

For example, this morning Sam was up earlier than Jake so we sat together at the breakfast table. He wanted to eat fast so he could play trains for awhile before we left for school. Last night I had patiently reassembled their train track after it had sat disassembled for weeks. I told him we should've fixed it sooner since he and Jake liked to play with it so much.

"But the coal loader is in the wrong place," he told me.

I started to explain. "Well, the track is kind of hard to put together so I started with the original track and didn't add the extra pieces until the end. I put the coal loader at the end of the track so the trains could pull off, load up, and get back on the track."

"But you need to move the buffer because the longer trains can't reach the coal loader before they hit the buffer. They can't load the coal," he told me.

I know it's not the theory of relativity, but it was a valid point, and one I'd missed.