You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.™
BABY BRAINS
The baby medulla oblingata is like a paper towel sucking up information.
I am reminded of this while watching the Discovery Channel. The episode: Jungle Frogs. Nothing excites like minutia about reptiles right?
As the narrator prattles on about amphibian procreation habits and rain forest ecosystems, my toddler is sitting on my lap.
The child’s ubiquitous thumb is firmly lodged between her lips. She snuggles next to me and stares into the phosphorescent jungles of South America.
Her breathing is so calm, so regular, I think she might be unconscious, put to sleep by a monotonous announcer who is convinced that frogs are tantamount to life.
The child is neither asleep, nor is she cuddling. She is processing information, warehousing data, and compiling facts.
During the commercial break, while some pitch man is trying to convince me to buy the latest in weed whacker technology, my baby daughter pulls her thumb out of her mouth and begins a discourse on frogs that blows my mind.
Wearing only a diaper, she stands in front of the TV and begins to orate like a prosecutor trying to convict Casey Anthony.
Her piercing blue eyes grab my attention faster than a bank bandit with a .38 and a Nixon mask.
As she speaks, her golden hair is floating on her scalp, dancing on the warm fumes of the nearby heating vent.
“Daddy,” she says, scratching her tiny tummy, “The frogs live in the trees.”
“They do,” I say a little surprised.
“And they are green like the leaves so they can hide and not be food for other jungle animals.”
“That’s right baby,” I retort, my mouth agape. “You learned all that from the show?”
“Of course silly Billy. I was watching. Weren’t you?”
Before I can respond, this tiny power broker of knowledge cuts me off.
Like a thumb sucking Yanamamo Shaman standing in the burning glow of the fire, she eloquently speaks.
“It’s camoflob”
“Camoflob?” I laugh out loud.
Only three years old, her words are part Ernie part Bert part Dora the Explorer.
“The frog’s tongue is yucky and makes the flies stick to it,” she says arms waving. “They have stuff in their stomach that helps them digest the bugs.”
She covers the concept smoothly like icing on a cupcake.
Words that would cause other two year olds to spontaneously explode are suddenly oratory tools in her vocabulary arsenal.
She sprinkles in a “Nocturnal” an “Amphibian” the word: “Canopy”
I am startled. She is using words so beyond her pay grade that I half way expected priests clutching crucifixes to burst through the door shouting the “power of Christ compels you”.
“Baby, I’m amazed that you retained so much information about the frog show,”
“Daddy. I like frogs, you silly Billy.”
“What part do you like the best baby?”
I watch as her mind begins thumbing through the index cards of her memory.
“HMMMM”
Like frozen molasses, the words slide down the back of her cerebral cortex, oozing into her voice box. Her neck constricts, her shoulders undulate. The words fester like globs of phlegm on the back of her tongue as they slowly, methodically meander toward her teeth.
Then with a glow of realization that she has mastered another concept of life’s infinite wisdom, she conveys the thought, the expression, the baby pearls of wisdom.
“I like the way they talk to each other by burping in the trees.”
I laugh out loud.
“Those aren’t burps, baby. That’s a ribot. That’s just a silly noise that frogs make.”
“It sounds like you daddy, after you drink soda.”
Like any parent, I’d love to stand on my soap box and tell you how I read the classics to my children.
Walden’s Pond.
Moby Dick.
Treasure Island.
But like the rest of the sixty-hour-a-week automatons in America, sometimes I come home and all I can do is fall back in the couch and push the remote control button.
What have I learned?
The baby brain is amazing and there is intelligent programming out there.
Expose your kids to the right stuff and they will breathe it in like the wonderful fragrance of pine at a Christmas Tree Farm in the mountains.
And that is crazy.™