The School-Run Stream Of Consciousness

 

 

When my daughter was about 2 years old, I used to look forward to her ‘stream of consciousness’ moments shortly after she woke up each morning. She would wake and start talking instantly. Non-stop for the first 15 minutes of the day! I remember comparing her, in my own geeky way, to a stream of computer commands flushing itself after 10 hours of not talking. Lara, the byte stream.

A little over two year’s on, my daughter seems to have found that same unstoppable voice on our way home from school each evening. Lara started school in September and she has taken to it so well (something I wasn’t expecting at all). Each afternoon or evening, when I pick her up, she has so much to tell me about the day that it just blurts out of her mouth in one long string of excitement.

There’s no stopping her. If you ask her what she had for her school dinner, she can talk for 15 minutes. Ask her about who she played with at lunch and you will get another half hour of fascinating insight into the world of 4 and 5 year olds. But you can’t interrupt her; it simply doesn’t work like that. She won’t hear you. She’s on a roll and can’t stop until the words run out.

I love it. I love that she has so much to say and so much to share. I love that her days are jam-packed full of new experiences and nuggets of new-found knowledge that she wants to pass on to us.

Admittedly, sometimes the message can be a little bit lost. Yesterday, for instance, my husband nearly crashed the car when Lara, from the back seat, told us how she was now an expert in “strip dancing”! After a few moments of uncontrollable laughter I finally determined that she had been learning how to line dance at school that day. Phew.

 And last week Lara came home enthused about planets and stars. “Mummy, do you know why the world is round?” she asked me.

Me: “You tell me.”

Lara: “It”s because the earth is God’s tummy”.

Me: “Errr.. OK. Isn’t it because of the gravitational pull on the earth’s mass?”

Lara: “No Mummy, its because we are all little people in his tummy. A bit like bacteria.”

 I love her to pieces and I hope that her enthusiasm for learning lasts.