My 5yo thought "south" was spelled with an L, like "salth." When i pronounced it for him more carefully, he protested "that's saying it like a baby."
2yo saw 5yo juicing lemons and asked, "can I lemonate?"
I helped my two older boys (5 and almost 3) extract DNA from strawberries, which the 5yo had been asking about for weeks. 2yo has a very old-school biochemistry approach: he wants to taste every step. When we had our product, they wanted to know "what can we do with it next?"
I had to dash their ambitions by explaining that we don't have a sequencer in our apartment.
Mom overheard the 5yo say something about "Nike," so she asked him what he was talking about (her brother works for the shoe company). He replied "The Goddess Nike, from the famous sculpture." She asked him how he knew about that, and he said "it's in the book 13 Famous Sculptures That Every Kid Should Know, and if every kid should know about it then grown-ups should know too."
My 5yo told me he could be a laundry helper today. "I am willing to do that." He said he could load the laundry bags into the wagon by himself, since "I am getting stronger from swinging on the monkey bars."
At the laundromat, he claimed one load for his own and insisted on doing every step himself, because he is pretending to be a grownup who brought his own clothes to the laundromat.
5yo asked if he could try counting to 300 some time, then made it as far as 200 and stopped. He said, "can you tell Ms. [Pre-K teacher] that I counted to 200? She said no one in my class could do it."
2yo was eating aioli with his dinner, not dipping his sweet potatoes in it like the rest of us but licking it straight off his fingers.
"Does this creamy sauce have garlic in it? Because I taste garlic."
I found my 5yo with the freezer open, calling for help. He said he was trying to do an experiment where he put ice cubes in a beaker and then watched then change into water and then into steam. But packages of food fell out of the freezer when he pulled out the ice tray.
What could I do, but get out a beaker for him, put on the stove top for him, and put a thermometer in?
At the playground today, I caught my 5yo putting the stem of a large leaf in his mouth. I recognized it as ground cover in the fenced planter areas. I must have given him quite a look, because before I could say anything he explained, "I'm tasting it to find out if it's Burdock or something else. [The 'something else' meant rhubarb]. It tastes bitter, so it must be Burdock."
James R.B. Eastwood