A Small Lump of Massachusetts

So, I'm sitting in church, minding my own business.

Well, I'm mostly minding my own business and trying to listen to the speaker.

Suddenly, a red-and-yellow object is thrust in front of my face.  "Afghanistan!" is whispered loudly at me.

I pull my baby's etch-a-sketch down to where I can see it.  On a tiny, two-inch by three-inch screen, he has drawn the outline of Afghanistan.  I nod.

Strangely enough, this is not exactly strange.  He's been drawing states for months.  He can get through all fifty in the time it takes four speakers and a musical number to wind down in the front of the chapel.  And I have come upon the volume A encyclopedia lying open on the floor--in front of the living room bookcase, or on his bed, or on the floor in his bedroom--several times.

But.  I do realize that not everyone's kindergartener is drawing Afghanistan in church, so I turn to my husband and whisper, "He drew Afghanistan."  I do this for the shared smile we give each other whenever one of our kids does something amusing.  

I turn my attention back (mostly) to the current speaker.  The speakers today are all high school kids who read their talks too fast for the concepts to seep in very deeply.  They are doing their best, but I am restless today.  And annoyed by something that happened right before church.  

I stare ahead blankly until I am nudged again.

"This is one quadrant of the earth," my brainy baby says, "from the prime meridian west and north of the equator."  He's missing his two top teeth now, so he's cuter than ever.

Again, I look down at the tiny screen.  North America is plainly drawn there, along with other partial continents and islands.  He points out this and that on the map. I want to squeeze his head, where all this smartness is, in a burst of affection, but I don't.  Like I said, I'm a little feisty today.  

 "Where are you?" I ask.  

He looks at me in surprise.

"Where's the church?"  

The North America he has drawn is about a one-and-a-quarter-inches squared area. I take his wand and calculate about where our city would be on the map and make a dot.

"That's on the border of Nevada and California!" he hisses at me.

I make another dot slightly up and over from that.

"The exact same spot," he says, his voice dripping with disgust.  

I laugh and hand the toy back to him. "Draw the southeast quadrant," I suggest.

A few minutes later, I am nudged again.  I look at the screen, expecting to see Australia looming large on it. But I don't.  "Where's Australia?" I ask him.  He points to a small object, accurate in shape, floating up in the middle of the screen.

A few minutes later, he shows me another picture.  Antarctica is sprawled all across the bottom of the screen, like it is on the placemat map he carries all over the house, and South America is clearly coming down toward it, joining it for a quarter of an inch. "That's good, but they don't touch," I remind him.

He looks stunned.  Wounded!  "What do you mean?"

"They don't touch," I repeat.

He recoils again.  "Touch what?"

"Each other."  

He erases his board.  

I am not prepared for what happens next.  He holds up a picture of a blob with mini rectangles and squares attached all around the outside of it.  "That's Atlanta!" he says.  

A city!

Okay, to me, it's one thing to have a picture in your head of how the earth looks or a country or a state.  But I couldn't draw a semi-accurate outline of my own city for a million dollars.  I nudge my husband again. "Now he's drawing cities," I tell him.  We share a look of wonderment.

But, wait!  There's more.

In the children's group, the song leader puts a sign with three Chinese characters up on the board.  "Can anyone read that?" she asks, kind of smart-alecky.

"Happy New Year!" my baby calls out.  "In Chinese."  

I whip around to look.  She confirms that he is right, and everyone laughs.

This kid can state all of the United States in alphabetical order and their capitals in alphabetical order.  He can list them by size and by date of entrance into the Union.  The.  Whole.  Lists.  I could guess the three biggest and the three smallest, the two oldest and the two newest, but that's about it.  And I've read the encyclopedia, too.

It's not just memorization.  He understands this stuff.  

I had tested his understanding of a new concept the day before.  "Suppose we compare the list of order and the list of size to find out which state would come out on top as far as newest and smallest," I suggested.  

My husband threw me a look like, "What are you trying to do?  Explode his head?"

But I thought he could do it.

"Hawaii!" he called out.  

"Very good," I said.  Then we discussed which state would be the oldest and biggest.  We discussed Alaska, Pennsylvania, New York, and Georgia as possible candidates.  I pointed out to him that, yes, Alaska is first in size, but 49th in age, so it would end up in the middle of the combined list.  We finally decided Georgia, 24th in size but fourth in entry to the union, would be the winner, then discussed that Virginia was much larger when it was made a state than it is now.  I thought maybe California, third in size, would be a candidate, but my baby knew that it is thirty-first in entry, so it would fall behind Georgia. 

And I haven't even mentioned that the week before, after I'd frosted a cake, my brainy baby had pointed out that the spatula had (accidentally) left a pretty good facsimile of the United States on one side of the cake. Nor that he said last night at dinner, "My meatloaf looks like a small lump of Massachusetts."

I just hope this kid keeps pouring what's in his head out for all of us to see and hear for the rest of my hilarious life.