the underwear drawer

30 posts in 30 days, day 29: bears swimming

I was wearing a t-shirt yesterday that read "BEARS SWIMMING" (I don't know, some sort random high school swimming team, I bought the shirt from a thrift shop in the mid 90's, when it was cool to pair such things with flannel and alienation) and holding Cal in my lap, facing me. He looked at my shirt, pointed at the R in BEARS, and said "aaaaarhh."

Oh, how cute, I thought to myself, it sounded like he said the letter "R." What a coincidence.

Then he pointed at the letter A and said, "aaaaaayyy." And at the letter E and said, "eeeeeee." And so on, until he had named almost every letter on the shirt. (The "W" gave him a little trouble.) Which begs the question, since when did Cal start knowing all these letters? The boy's been holding out on me! He's known the letter "O" for a few months now, but that one doesn't count, because it's easy. He's always been weirdly interested in letters and numbers (as in: there is a brightly colored picture with a caption, and he instantly attends to the boring little letters instead of the interesting picture of bunnies on dump trucks eating candy), pointing to the letters one by one until we named them. We always humored him, but were't drilling him by any means, and I had no sense that he was actually retaining anything that we were saying until now. Go figure. The boy may actually be half bright.

Then again, he did try to eat the dog's tail yesterday, so maybe not that bright.