His own Garden

You know that image you see every spring, the one of the first crocuses of the year budding out of the lawn, the sun filters down on them, they are surrounded with the last remnants of the winter’s snow.

That is the best analogy I can come up with for the blossoming I have witnessed over the last 3 weeks.  It is easy to see cognitive development during the first year of a child’s birth.  There are so many rapid changes occurring that spotting the first word, the first sentence, watching the first concepts form is easy.

It changes as the children get older, the development still occurs but it is much slower and often lost in the frantic pace of life, even more so when you add in additional children.

Two, maybe three weeks ago someone reached deep inside Aiden’s brain and flicked a switch. He has exploded with intellect, questions flowing from him with incessant rapidity.  Complex questions that he thinks about, he strings together from his own experiences.  He will ask a question, then several days later expand on it after absorbing the original answer.  He is picking up on things that I did not know he knew about. In the last days he has asked me about the pupils in his eyes, what are the main organs in the body, what a parallelogram was (where the hell did that come from).

Each night while reading before bed, we can scarcely get through a paragraph without his questions leading him off in new directions.

I am truly enjoying this phase and even though it is sometimes difficult I am working very hard to not “blow him off” but to answer the questions and encourage the thought process.

Like the first buds of spring I am desperately curious to see what kind of garden will eventually grow from these early days of his spring.