I'll Regret This Later

In the spirit of chronicling the lives of my young ones, and Chuck and me as parents, I'm going to out myself.

I'll regret this later.

I was picking Ryker up from school last week and one of the teachers pulled me aside and said that they were going to be moving him up to the upper preschool room. The way our school works is there is an infant room, toddler room, and then a lower and an upper preschool room.

My reaction? "Is he smart enough for that?"

I kid you not. That is the first thing that popped into my head, and I lost my filter a long time ago, so it came spilling right out of my mouth unabridged.

Here's the thing - it's not that I don't think Ryker is smart. It's just that he doesn't get the chance to show it to us that often, or I don't have a comparison. The comparison I DO have is Jackson, who is 3 years older and brilliant. Jack has conversations with me about democracy, the civil rights movement, physics, and social justice. (Okay, he has the physics discussion with Chuck, not me.) I have conferences with his teacher wherein she tells me that he's smart.

Ryker, on the other hand, is sort of like a pet. He's my little puppy. He's a goof and likes music and sports and doing anything Jackson does. But I have no barometer on his intelligence. He sits quietly while Jack and I have our discussions and then participates by yelling "booty!" once in awhile.

To be fair, I also used to pay attention to all the mile-markers with Jack. I was all OVER Baby Center's website to see what Jack should be doing and when, so I knew if he was doing something that OLDER babies were doing. Comparisons. With Ryker, I am not nearly as paranoid and don't have nearly as much time on my hands.

So I let that slip to the teacher. She looked at me with wide eyes and said "umm, yes. He's a really smart kid." I tried to not look surprised.

While I'm outing myself - my NEXT thought was "oh crap, I have another too-smart-for-his-own-good child."

Wish me luck.