Uncanny Memory?

My brain is full.   Or at least that what it feels like as I go through my days realizing I’m not remembering things.  Some of the not remembering I realize is a lifetime of conditioning.   I put things in certain places so I don’t have to remember where I put those things.   The thing, say my keys, is always in it’s “place” and is one less thing I need to remember.  Other things I don’t make a specific effort to remember so later, when it turned out I did in fact need to know what percentage of national spending is made by the middle and lower classes, it turns out I don’t know anymore.

Some things are age-related I’m sure though.   My son, who’s brain is filled with only eight years of memories seems to have an uncanny ability to remember things.  There was a game he played on the iPad with me for a while.   There were pictures of shields with each shield having both a name and two separately “powers”.   He couldn’t read at the time so the only way he knew what the shield did was from listening to the descriptions.   There had to be fifty of the shields and he knew from the picture what each shield’s name was and the name of each power.

He’s demonstrated good recall in other things too, but it struck me tonight that he’s got a little more of an exact memory than I realized.   We’re reading The Magic Treehouse books at night.   These are chapter books that I heard the children might like as bedtime stories.   When I got the first set of four in the mail, my son told me he’d been reading them at school.

He’s ten or so books ahead of us but doesn’t seem to overly mind hearing the stories again at night.   I just finished reading Night of the Ninjas tonight.  My son had read this book some time back at school.   We read some together several days ago and then last night he wanted me to read the rest of the book to him before bed.   His sister had fallen asleep early so I told him I would read it to him, but he had to be okay hearing it again (and not complaining) when I read the last few chapters to his sister tonight.

Last night I finished the book with my son while his sister slept.   This was now his second reading through, although a few months after his first reading.   Tonight, after the children were in their beds and I was in the reading chair across the room facing them, I started to read.  My son couldn’t see the book but he started calling out sentence words and endings, saying the words aloud at the same time as I was reading them.   This is annoying if you’re a listener, so we asked him to stop, but he’d finished at least five unpredictable sentences by that point.   Was he guessing the words or did he remember them?  The books aren’t long, but I read for a half-hour to them and that’s a lot of words to keep in your head.

A bit after he’d stopped co-reading with me I misread two lines.   I read the first line in the boy’s voice and realized at the end of the sentence it was the girl speaking.   So I read the next line like it was the girl talking to maintain the continuity of the conversation.   It was something like, “We need to hurry.” and “We’ll never make it.”—not anything that clearly indicated one or the other child had spoken either sentence.

My son suddenly said, “that’s not right.”  He told me, "Annie said, 'We need to hurry.' and Jack said, 'We’ll never make it.’”  It was a little uncanny that he remembered the words that specifically.   I told him he was correct and kept reading.  If his sister hadn’t been in the room I would have asked him to read with me again just to see how much he really did remember.

The Big Boy Update:  My parents were over for dinner tonight.   As we were getting our plates to sit down to dinner I heard my son say to my father, “were you the first one in your class to be able to count to one hundred?"

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My mother mentioned how my son was a member of the Clean Plate Club at dinner tonight when she saw he’d finished his meal.   It struck me that we hadn’t sung the “Clean Plate Club” song in probably two years so I launched into the brief, repetitive song my children used to love.   My daughter, who knows the word ‘plate’ sang it as, “clean clate club” clearly every time.  We sang the song again when the next person finished their plate and, yes, that’s how she was singing it.   By the third rendition my husband asked her what she was singing and she insisted she was saying, ‘plate’.   She demonstrated by singing, “clean plate club” very clearly.   And for the next two iterations of the song she sang it as though she’d never gotten the word wrong.   I wonder if she was singing from memory of how she did several years ago and didn’t even think about the sounds as they happened until it was brought to her attention?