Smarties At The Park

We went exploring in our new neighborhood the other day.  We were on a mission to find "the pirate park".  I find it kind of irritating that none of the parks in this town come with parking lots.  They're all tucked away into watershed areas or something so you have to walk in.  It's like a passive-aggressive way to get us to save the planet by driving less.

I digress.

So we found the pirate ship park and my kids were enjoying it tremendously.  Kicking soccer balls, shooting down slides, swinging until they puked, etc.

And not too long after we'd been there, an Asian woman and her two kids came into the park via the longest walking trail.  Yey them!

And they were blabbing away in Chinese or something, and my kids were like - Whoa.  (They were impressed.)  So these Asian kids were obviously bi-lingual because they were talking to both their mom and to my kids.  They can also probably read, even though neither of them could have been older than three.  And I wouldn't be surprised if they could have taken apart the mother-board of my computer and programmed it to make toast when I turn it on in the morning. 

We live near Intel.  I'm going to go out on a politically incorrect limb here and say that being near Intel means that half of our town's population is Indian or Asian.  Those folks tend to be the techy type.  My poor kids are going to continue to run across more of these kinds of super smart children, and about a year from now I fully expect them to have crappy self-esteem.  

So I'm watching my Drew and my Trent play with these two Asian kids, and it was cracking me up.  Trent's babbling away in his language that consists only of the consonant "D" and the vowel "A", and he's wearing a diaper even though he looks like he's four.  Then there's Drew who intentionally lands on his head every time he goes down the slide. He then rolls for about three feet through the sawdust, pretending to be injured and leaps up to do it again.

The first time the mother of the genius kids saw Drew going down the slide and then witnessed the hit and roll she sucked half the atmosphere into her lungs, and her body got stuck between helping him and waiting for me to take the opportunity to be a responsible mother.   

Physical hesitation mixed with mental infuriation is a funny sight.

Andrew was sitting next to me on a bench and he started to laugh and congratulate Drew on his performance.  The Mother of Geniuses looked over at us and asked if Drew was OK.  We said yes - in the sense that she was inquiring about.

My kids are awesome.  And they need to learn another language if they're going to keep up with their kindergarten class.