May I Be Excused? My Brain Is Full

Yesterday as we sat eating our after-school snack, my six-year-old roommate -- to be identified hereafter as Shortcake -- made a puzzled face and asked, "How does your brain go to the bathroom?"

As much as that girl's brain eats, I can understand her concern.

At home, Shortcake and I practice addition and subtraction of three digit numbers as well as exercises in grouping ("five groups of eight is forty, right?" she asks excitedly), a concept she will later come to understand as multiplication. At school, she gets a paper dotted with puppies and smiley faces and has to count to see how many of each there are. Her reading assignments are three-page "books" that contain huge pictures and fewer than twelve [typically monosyllabic] words. When she finishes those, she leaves the kitchen table and goes back to the couch to continue reading Narnia.

It's giving me flashbacks to the day in kindergarten when one of the other teachers was reading us a mystery book where the heroes had to crack an alphabet code. "Do any of you know how many letters there are in the alphabet?" she asked us, obviously not expecting an answer. I shot my hand up and replied, "Twenty-six." Her eyes widened. "How did you know that, sweetie?" I smiled politely. "I've already read this book."

So I've been racking my brain for ways to keep her intellectually stimulated, and then it hit me: she needs to be able to do what I do when my brain has to go to the bathroom.

Heaven help me... I think she needs a blog.