courtesy of huffingtonpost.com

I find it funny that the almost 22 month old knows ALL of her letters (capital AND lower case) and can name them faster than her big brother, prompting him to either stomp away or try to hurt her without me seeing it.

The 4 year old, like his older brother before him, enjoys running, jumping, playing, hiding, throwing, and HATES to be sat down to practice writing his letters. He never wants to “play school”, yet he does enjoy school while he is there. If I let him watch TV, he begs for sponge-bob. NOT anything educational.

The toddler begs to watch this Youtube video I found about letters, initially meant for the older one. She’s obsessed with it and if allowed, will sit at a kitchen chair and stick her face in my laptop until I force her to go play. She knew her letters before I even  knew she knew…. showing my sister pieces from a letter puzzle and reciting them correctly “A….U….R….”. My sis was shocked….. and I acted of course like it was no big deal, then made her do it for me over and over when we were alone together.

4 year old can count….but often skips important numbers like 15, 18, and it gets pretty shady after 30. Toddler has learned to count to 15…she does not skip numbers. She will also start where you leave off, which is how I found out she could go past 10…when I heard her little voice saying “11….12….13….” I learned this week that she can also count to 10 in Arabic.

She’s a genius, right?

Surely, she will find a cure for cancer….

The fact that she already knows shapes like diamond, triangle, and star, and the difference between an square and rectangle means she is absolutely the smartest toddler on the face of this planet, right??

she speaks in full sentences, makes jokes, expresses herself so well…. There can be no doubt of her greatness, and future of even more greatness….right?

I don’t know, really.

I do know this…. my oldest was a lot like the baby is now, talked early, and amazed me with her abilities. When my second was born… the first boy…. I wondered what was wrong with him. Why didn’t he talk? Where was that breezy recognition of the world, so effortless for the first? He was so different, and we worried….maybe he wouldn’t be as smart??? Is that terrible?

But now, so many years later…. you would not know they ever started out so differently. Both so intelligent, avid readers, and the 13 year old scores impossibly high in math and science. He was not, and is not a dummy. He just took longer to focus, to slow down.

So with the second two…. I’m not so concerned about the 4 year old not reading on his own yet… or still mixing up some letters. I work with him, and play with him too. He’s a smart kid, but right now he would rather wear his Halloween costume all over the house, fighting bad guys and saving the world…it’s more appealing to him than writing out his “R’s” in a nice neat row. he will be fine.

The toddler is just fun right now, and I’m enjoying how much she can absorb. I expect that with the passage of time, she will prove to be a smart little girl, the regular kind, not the genius kind. I won’t lie though, yesterday I was playing a math game with the 4 year old…”If I have 2 apples, and daddy gives me 2 more apples, how many do I have?…. I was seriously expecting the baby to start jumping in with correct answers. That really would have freaked me out.

Now that I am in this parent gig, 4 kids deep…. I’ve learned that things usually have a way of evening out… so I’m not going to plan for the youngest to take over the world just yet…..but I still like to catch her singing her ABC’s on video, and sharing those little moments with my friends.

I hope people don’t find me obnoxious when I post these video’s on Facebook. Because I still can’t help it, I find it so adorable, and I want to catch everything she does and share how happy she makes me. I love that she surprises me so often, and can communicate so well with me.

She’s my last one people!! Let me have that. I am just so happy with her I sometimes want to squeeze her until she pops.