The Genius that is Childhood

I am always blown away by the child's ability to think outside the box. As a (sort of) writer, I kind of pride myself in the ability to see uses for things that aren't conventionally thought of, but as good as I am (narcissistic? maybe a bit), I will never be as good as my kiddos.

They seriously surpass me time and time again in the out of the box thinking. The other day, Andersen - yes, you read that right, Andersen - used one of their push carts as steps to climb up on the coffee table. Of course, looking at the thing I never saw it as steps. Now, that's all I can see!! Like one of those pictures that's either a wine glass or two people looking at each other. Once someone points out one, it's extremely difficult to see the other.

One of my favorite examples of this was the sock pegss. I have a problem with socks when watching the kids. They always seem to get separated and lost and I can never find them. Sometimes I'll have the presence of mind to take the socks off when I take the shoes off, but my kids are at the point where they can take their own shoes off all by themselves, thank you very much. Super duper!

Problem with that is, they don't always announce when they're taking their shoes off, and the socks tend to come off 5 minutes apart from each other. -_- I'll talk to them ahead of time and tell them they need to keep their socks on, which they of course respond to with "Ok Wowen ok". And then their socks always manage to "fall off" sometime later.

So I've been trying to find a way to keep them together, so they don't get lost... and recently I mentioned to Asher that if he wanted to take his socks off, he had to give them to me or put them up somewhere together. Well, he took his socks off and left them on the ground, and Camden saw them, picked them up, and stuck each one on one of the coat pegs by the back door. And they stayed there all day.

He did this all by himself. There was no "look at me!" or "help Ms. Wowen!" He just climbed up and put them there himself.

Seriously, what a genius idea! The socks are in plain site, and together, so they don't get lost!! You can bet your bottom dollar I'll be using this idea in the future, yes sir-ee. But I never would have thought of that on my own.

Kids man. Kids.