Yesterday I went for my run in shorts and a tank top. Today it is snowing. God love spring in Chicago!

Words of wisdom from AJ:

i.

[Last night at dinner] "Mommy, I'm a genius, right?"

"Well, you're pretty smart, but I'm not sure about a genius. Who told you that you were a genius?"

"I did." [Clearly we've gone a little too far with our confidence building. This resulted in a lecture about bragging. But I tried not to harsh his toke.]

ii.

[upon arrival in the kitchen this morning after getting out of bed, before saying good morning] "This must be the grey light of morning, because it's grey but it's also light outside. And it's morning."

iii.

[upon leaving the house to go to school by car instead of on foot as we've done for the rest of the week] "I wish we were walking today because, much to my surprise, it is not as cold as I thought it would be."

I will spare you AJ's incessant spouting of arcane facts about tornados from a book he read in the school library yesterday. He keeps saying things like, "Tornados come from the northwest, right Mommy?" And I have to reply, "I really don't know, AJ. You know more about tornados than I do." Still, I'm hoping I'm not encouraging him to start spouting off about being a genius at school. Yesterday I overheard The Girl Next Door tell him that one of the boys in his class doesn't like to read next to him because it makes him nervous. Although to be fair, she also told him two of the girls in the class think he's really cute. The Girl Next Door is quite a font of information, both real and imagined.

But the whole way AJ talks has changed a lot in the last few weeks. He's suddenly sounding much older. He speaks in complex sentences and poetic turns of phrase. I'm not sure where the idea of "the grey light of morning" came from. Probably a book. Or my mother. But AJ has a poetic soul and lately he's been trying to stretch his use of language in order to encompass all he sees. It's fascinating to hear. And also very funny. Because he just doesn't sound like a barely six-year-old boy.

But he's not all poetry. As the tornado fascination suggests, he is still my science nerd. We gave him a copy of The New The Way Things Work for his birthday and he likes to bring it to breakfast and pour over the descriptions of assorted machines while he's eating his cereal. I promised him that after school, we could look inside the back of the toilet while we flushed. See how much fun it is to live in the Spy household? Don't you wish you lived here too?

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