Our Story

Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Final Jeopardy Is Still Mine!


I've already come to the realization that my children are smarter than me.
Has it happened to you as well?
I knew it would happen eventually. 
I knew that one day my mind would become feeble and resemble swiss cheese. 
While their minds would remain crisp and fresh. 
But at the ages of nine and five?
I thought at least it would happen when they got their Masters Degrees in Smartyology or Bigbraininess. 
But now?

Zoe is a math master. 
Well, to me she is anyway. 
I couldn't do squat when math was presented to me in grade school...my mind has actually been swiss cheese-like since 1978. 
Zoe has certainly inherited her dad's math DNA. 
She can hear numbers and BOOM give you the correct answer right away. 
So, the fact that math comes so easy to her astounds me!
She was asked recently by her oncologist what her favorite subjects in school are. 
Art and math. 
She's totally utilizing both sides of her brain folks. 
The right and the left side. 
No Swiss cheese there!

Now, back to that word I mentioned before...oncologist. 
I'm even more amazed that she's so good in math (and in all of her school subjects) because of the chemo. 
"Oncologist" and "9 year old girl" should not be in the same sentence. 
But they are at our house. 
And her doctors are amazed as well. 
The chemo that she has ingested. 
That has been injected into her veins and muscles. 
The chemo that was inserted into her spinal fluid so that it would find its way to her brain. 
The radiation that silently zapped areas within her gray matter that did who knows what in there. 
All of that happened and she's smart.
High Honor Roll all year long smart. 
She makes me so very proud. 

And her sister. 
I read a book recently that said if a child can figure out how to lie at an early age then they are really smart. 
It takes a lot of smarts to figure out how to manipulate a situation to get the outcome you desire. 
And Gigi has been a great liar these past few years. 
The years when she learned to walk and talk and to concoct her plans. 
Gigi's a damn genius!
I recently learned that not only is Gigi a good liar, but that she's school smart as well. 
She had a screening for kindergarten which she'll start in the fall. 
All children entering kindergarten must be screened...vocabulary, motor skills, letter recognition, etc. 
I was told that Gigi out scored all of the other children by a landslide. 
Meaning Gigi stood strongly at the top of the mountain while she looked down at all of the other kids still climbing up.
She has been camped out on that mountaintop for a good long while. 
Her preschool teacher told us LAST year that she was helping kids (who were going into kindergarten before her) how to do sequences and which shapes were which and how to write letters. 

Stay at home moms always wonder if they are doing things right. 
Am I stimulating them enough?
Opening up their world to new ideas?
Challenging them?
I can't take most of the credit, though. 
I am super proud, though. 
They are who they are. 
DNA is a magical mystery of cells and synapses and chemistry and yadda, yadda, yadda. 
But, my old brain has still has something over them and their whipper-snapper noggins. 
I can beat them at Final Jeopardy!
For now...







1 comment:

  1. You have amazing daughters. I am blessed to have met them and really enjoy reading about them here on the blog!

    ReplyDelete