I love it when Dorothy doesn't know the name of something. She mentioned that a girl in school got stitches in her foot, so she wore a bandage with "the shoes that are sort of like flip flops, and they have holes all over them, and they have no back."
I love it when Dorothy organizes things in ways that I didn't see coming. "I can't find that little doll with brown hair," she told me. "And I already looked in the bucket of dolls with eyes that open and close."
A few months ago at the open house for Dorothy's school, the art teacher had set up a table with a "guess the number of crayons in this jar" activity. She engaged with each student, let him or her guess three times, and the child always seemed to guess the right number on the third try. This went over Dorothy's head, and I had no idea at the time how often we would revisit that event -- "Can you BELIEVE that there were 77 crayons in the jar?!"
Dorothy asks questions about math that I can't answer. The homework word problem was: "Ann had band-aids on two of her fingers. How many fingers were not hurt?" Dorothy asked me, "Out of five fingers, or ten?"
Dorothy said they were talking about cowboys in class. I grabbed a placemat map and pointed out the Western United States, and said a few sentences about how we expanded West. When I was done, Dorothy asked, "Why do you keep saying 'we?'"
I mentioned something to Dorothy about how she knows all her spelling words because she got them right on her test. She replied that she did not know if she got them right on the test. After further discussion, I figured out that the teacher grades the tests and sends them home in a folder; I file away the papers, and Dorothy never sees them, and she's been wondering this whole time how she did on her spelling tests.
I was preparing to watch the Notre Dame game, and in an effort to preoccupy Dorothy, I asked if she had any birthday presents she hadn't used yet that she could do during the game. "No," she said. "I mean, I haven't used the unicorn clay jewelry set, but it inquires the oven."
That football game was the pits, and Dorothy watched it with me and chimed-in often. Each time Cincinnati did something great and I fussed, Dorothy and her misplaced empathy would encourage me to "just think about how the other team is feeling right now."