Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Little Pitchers Have Big Ears

Where did that saying come from? Pitchers don’t even have ears, much less big ears. How does this work? Maybe I’m missing the 19th century cultural reference, but I really don’t get it.

However, I know what it means, and it’s true. This morning as we were waiting to turn left at one of those green lights, not an arrow green, so you could turn as soon as it was clear, OC said, “Who opened the gate?” because there were lots of cars coming. This, she learned from her step-father, my darling new husband, who is full of quips like these. He is so proud!

And those adorable little pitchers have wonderfully acute hearing for words like "ice cream" and "let's go to the park", but things like "clean up your room" and "go brush your teeth" go unheard and often, unheeded. Big ears; selective hearing.

Then last week, when we were at a football game, OC found a girl her age to play with. The girl came to the game prepared, with gymnastic skills to climb and slide on the stair rails, and crayons and coloring books when that got boring. She shared her toys with OC, who colored a picture and then wrote her name, which contains the letter ‘e’. The girl said, “That’s not an ‘e’.” They argued good-naturedly for a bit, then the girl finally wrote what she thought was a proper letter ‘e’, to which my child, the smartest 4-year-old on the planet, said, “Oh, that’s a CAPITAL ‘e’!”

Of course, this is the same child who walks forward (or backward) while looking to the side, and when she runs into something and gets hurt, she looks astounded that something like that could happen.

But, I still think she’s a genius!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

"who opened the gate" is WAY tame considering what could have been picked up!