Thursday, September 25, 2008

Connections

My kids were in an incredibly chatty mood last night as they were finishing up homework.

My youngest (9 years old) had finished up early and was having an ice cream cone and was talking with me in the kitchen about the different kinds of ice cream he's had, but in that process he remembered something that was connected. The roller coaster at King's Island he rode around the same time he first had Dippin' Dots. And that lead to a whole sequence of related thoughts about vacations and what to do for vacation next summer.

Then he stops and says "That drives me crazy, you think about one thing, then something else, then something else, then something else, pop, pop, pop!" I laughed - "That's how our brains work, making connections between everything."

We started playing around with this idea, contrasting how things in the real world are connected physically, but then the same things can have completely different connections in our brains.

My two older sons hopped right into the conversation bringing up example after example of crazy associations they experience. One of my favorites was my oldest describing how he always remembers some treat he got from Dairy Queen when he plays a particular part of "The Clone Wars" on the Game Cube because the first time he played that mission he was having that treat at the same time.

I love these kinds of conversations with my kids. Seeing them take an idea, understand it and zoom off, it was like popcorn popping as ideas and memories came flooding out for a few minutes.

I would swear as a kid I did not think this way - thinking about thinking. So on a regular basis my kids surprise me with observations and questions about why things are they way they are, about how what's happening makes them feel, or how it is that ideas that pop into their heads at all. I don't get this kind of conversation from adults in many cases!

It just makes me look forward to seeing what kinds of ideas are going to pop out next as they look beyond the surface and the web of connections we've formed as we interact every day comes into play with every new experience.

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