When the Over-Educated Reproduce

I fell in love with Az for many reasons, not least of which was the way he read the dictionary in the bathroom. I am not a fan of reading anything in the bathroom (I can’t get comfortable with the seat making a ring around my butt), but, for someone who does, there is a straightforward hunger for knowledge in choosing a dictionary. He never stops learning, and if nothing else currently intrigues him, he will happily spend a few minutes learning new words.

For years he teased me that our children would learn to write the same way humanity did: in Sumerian. I rolled my eyes at this, and he has since given it up. But JellyBean is a booklover, and the last few months has shown a special interest in my cookbooks and Daddy’s paleontology books. She looks at these with us, and I keep my explanations simple, remembering that she is only three. “That’s a blueberry pie,” I say, and she happily learns the names of all the different fruits and foods pictured.

Az is more ambitious. Jellybean sits in his lap every evening to be read to. Sometimes she brings a large anthropology textbook called Peoples of the Past, and turns through the pages as Az explains each photo to her. By now she has most of the pictures memorized. “The Venus of Brassen-Pouille!” she announces happily. “A Harlan’s ground sloth!” she says again, a few pages later. I have stopped looking at this book with her, because she knows more about it than I do.

She has already outpaced me, and she is only three.

When she identifies parts of the human skeleton, Az merely glows and looks smug. Of course, his daughter would do such things. To JellyBean, Daddy’s books simply present possibilities for great games.

She raced through the study before bedtime, jumping and making Sweetpea giggle. “I’m a skull from Shanidar!” she declared, and leaped out of the room.

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