Whaaaa........?

Our seven-year-old just blew my mind.

He has been acting pretty irritable lately, like he would if he wasn't getting enough sleep.

Then this evening he explains to his grandma what he's learning these days. A month ago, his response to someone's question about school was that he was still thinking about whether he wanted to homeschool this year. (News to me at the time.) Today, he told her we're mostly doing Paddington and United States and world history, that we were learning about the founding of the colonies, and that we had just begun to learn about medieval times. Then he told her two jokes in a row, starting with one that was relevant to the Middle Ages, that were actually funny.

(Why are the Middle Ages sometimes called the Dark Ages? Because of all the knights!)

He continued to explain things to her in a fashion that was very articulate and smooth compared to Xander in the past. He continued explaining things to me all throughout dinner.

At some point, he undid a bulky duct-tape fixing job I had done on one of their figures and fixed it with less tape so the toy was more usable.

I measured him again because I could see his mental capacity was growing and wondered if he had gotten taller, too. He was a bit taller than a few weeks ago.

He asked me what Greek myth I wanted him to read to his little brother. Coming out of my own reverie and trying to figure out where this was coming from, I said, "You mean, Thor?"

He said, "No, Mom, Greek myths."

Then he read one of the abridged Greek myths to me, about Perseus and Andromeda. He needed help pronouncing those two names, but the rest of the story flowed smoothly. He has always been good about reading with feeling, even when he was a more hesitant reader-aloud. The passage included words like "dazzled" and "writhing."

Then he re-read the rest of the book to himself.

I was called "the nicest mom in the galaxy - to me, at least. That I know of."

A note I wrote to him two years ago and put in his lunchbox had been saved near his bed. While cleaning up, we found it, and he said, "Oh! This note helps me sleep better!"

He proceeded to tell me how he decided to organize the hanging storage over the back of his bed and his reasons for what he had done, including two risks that he could have incurred by organizing things differently.

He remembered that he had forgotten to do a load of laundry today. I told him he could do it tomorrow. He said, "You should really let me do that job all by myself sometime." After I agreed, he planned to try to do it all by himself on the last day of this month, "in 20 days."

All of this stuff is probably normal for a seven-year-old, but it hasn't been quite like this around here! He has matured steadily. But tonight was off-the-charts growth.