My kid can read, but your kid is smart, too. Probably.

Maybe you came to this blog to find out about us and our adoption. Well, okay. We're in progress- it feels like slow progress to me but I have been assured we are speeding through it. We're almost done with documents and then once those are all mailed to us and hither and yon, we are almost financially ready to start the next step. So, there you go

Today is Thursday, which I typically think is Friday. The difference between Thursday and Friday, if you were wondering, is storytime. We go once a week to one of the many local libraries and hear some books read, sing some songs, kinda, and so on. Popular with the younger set. I have been diligently schooling Toby on proper library behavior, and he's basically got it. Brynn, on the other hand, is not cooperative. With anything, ever, actually. But that is another post. So after the first week, we worked on sitting where the teacher says, and listening quietly, raising your hand for questions and quiet mouths when the teacher is talking. He has been rocking it. It helps that Ms. Deb is a little bit of a tyrant.

There was a substitute teacher today, a nice one. She really narrated through the stories and then asked tons of questions, about the stories and the pictures and all the little people were SO excited to answer. So the indoctrination started weakening then... after a few minutes, he was interrupting excitedly after every page, and making sound effects and so on. What was my angel Brynn doing during all this, maybe you're asking. She was climbing on the table, running down the aisles, and collecting massive stacks of board books for me to read.

During the second book, the teacher asked some question, and Toby read the answer off the page. I have honestly been trying to lay a little low about Toby reading, because people make a big deal and then I feel like they think I think their kid is stupid and so on. At first she ignored it, but he kept reading stuff. When he nailed the word "recipe", she stopped and asked him if he'd read this book before. "No..." he said, kinda confused. After a minute she asked him if it would be all right if she read the story and he listened. He was very agreeable and polite, but I just got this sick feeling in my stomach from all the times I read too fast, or caught a teacher misspelling, or just accidentally showed how smart I was- at 6 or 7 years old.

He has no concept of any of that- he is so excited to be able to read- reads himself to sleep every night, and I am developing an addiction to buying him books at the thrift. I just dread, a little, when he figures out that sometimes being smart is a bad thing- or perceived as a bad thing. I worry too much.

After storytime, I ended up in a conversation with the teacher and the other moms about him, and tried to explain that he taught himself to read at 3 from playing Starfall and watching Sesame Street... I learned at 4 from a computer program my dad made. Shoot, I don't know. Is it genetic? Or what? Anyway, now I have to make a new rule about not reading out loud unless the teacher asks him to.