“And Then…”

There is an age that should be titled the, “and then” age.   It’s the age when a child blows past the maximum words they can use in a sentence because they realize all they need to do is put, “and then” at the end of a thought and they can stream it into the next, and next, and next, and next… thoughts.  

My daughter has figured this out and she’s done so earlier than her brother has.  I don’t think this is necessarily because she’s smarter than he is or because she is better verbally.   I think it’s because she realizes she can continue to hold your attention as long as she’s still completing one stream of thought.   Or so it seems to me.

That’s not always the case though, sometimes she has gotten quite interested in the story she was telling and neatly summed it up in one very protracted, run-on sentence.    It’s hard to interrupt a child to tell them you don’t have another ten minutes to hear about the acorn, the leaf and the piece of bark in the back yard because you need to answer the phone.

Recently I was substituting at school and one student in particular gave an exceptionally long performance of his “and then” skills while we were eating lunch.   The story veered off in unrelated directions so many times I wasn’t even sure if it was a real story, a dream or something he was just making up as he went in order to not lose our attentions (he had already lost us all.)   When I finally interrupted him one very patient student at the table said, “you should let other people have a chance to talk during lunch.”

We’re not that sophisticated in our “and then” story telling here at the house, but they are just starting to hone their skills.

The Big Boy Update:  This may make you cringe.  It did to me, but note that it was innocent in intention.    There was a commercial with a graphic image of a semi-automatic weapon of some sort that stayed there for the entire thirty-second commercial.   For the readers and adults in the room, we could read about how easy it would be to procure one of these weapons in our state and how bad that was.   My son, who has never seen a real gun brightened up and said, “dad has one of those.   He gets the bad guys with it in his video game.”    We are not going to be able to shelter our children for all of their lives, our hope is we can educate them and help them make moral decisions.   For now, I told him that yes, that did look similar to one of dad’s pretend guns in his video game.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  We were waiting for my daughter’s eye drops at the pharmacy drive-through this afternoon.  My daughter decided it was a good time to roll her window up and down, now that she’s large enough to reach the button.   After a few minutes of laughing happily at her new-found control over her window she said quietly to herself, “this is the best!”