Conversation while tucking Jee in bed:
Me reading from an Earth Science book: "...is a liquid called magma..." I pause, look in his little eyes and try to elicit some good vocab / pronunciation work from him. "Say m-a-g-m-a."
Jee: "Lava" (big giggles)
Me: ??
Jee: "Well, it's magma when it's inside the earth, but... (little twitch) it's lava when it comes out!"
How do I so consistently underestimate my kids? What is up with that dynamic? I thought I had my sights set so high, building a vision of successful futures for each of them, yet time after time, they do stuff like that where they swoop in under my expectation-of-the-moment and blast it to bits. He was way beyond vocab work on that one.
Like at the library earlier on today, we're picking out books. I picked out a stack of early readers, Level 2 for Jee while he's over "goofing off" at the spinning racks of books-for-middle-schoolers. He has picked out a stack of five (he knows the limit) books ranging from 48 pgs to nearly 200 pgs. I try to encourage him towards the 10 words per page L2 books, but no, he's back to looking at the paperback racks.
I get distracted and when I reconnect with him a good 30 min later, he's several pages into a very heavy book. Maybe he'll end up like Vee, devouring so many books (and hearing the big words used in context so rarely) that he ends up using the big words in his daily speech because those words are so familiar and so well-loved for him, yet "mispronunciating" them.
Magma --> lava. I didn't know that.
