Amy Giampetroni is a happily married woman, a full-time stay-at-home mom to a preschool boy and a part-time stepmom to an adolescent girl, living in Wisconsin. You can read more about Amy here and at her blog, Average Everyday Super Woman. Click here to check out Amy’s other posts on This Mommy Gig.

Like many moms, I’m often amazed at the things that come out of my son’s mouth, primarily because they illustrate just how active his mind is at making connections and sorting out what it means to be a part of this crazy world.  With Angelo, one often gets the impression that he’s an old man in a little boy’s body based on the things he says and the observations he makes. 

Case in point:  Angelo and I meet up for lunch with a good friend of mine (my sister’s high school boyfriend, to be specific) about once a month, and Angelo really likes him.  Mike is great with kids (he has a 19-year-old stepson, an 8-year-old son and a 3-year-old daughter himself — and is happily married, I might add!) and does a fabulous job of helping me keep Angelo from dying of boredom while he and I chat about grown-up things that mean nothing to my son, like work, our families, etc.  

Anyway, last night as we were driving home from our friends’ house, Angelo asked what we were going to be doing today, and I told him that we had lunch plans with Mike, and that Daddy was going to join us for a bit since Mike offered to help Dan with his job search (long story short, Mike is a VP at an exec placement firm - perfect, right?).  

Angelo was quiet for a bit and then said, “Dad, have you met Mike?”

Dan replied, “Not yet, buddy.” 

“Oh.  Well, you’re really going to like him.  He’s a great guy.”  This from my FIVE-year-old, people.  

Dan and I looked at each other and I commented on how unusual it was for Angelo - a five-year-old - to say something like that.  I mean, the simple fact that he has even contemplated Mike and whether he’s a “good” or “bad” guy says volumes about his awareness, and that he came to the conclusion that Mike is, in fact, “a great guy” that his dad should meet and get to know is absolutely delightful to me.

His other big thing of late is to ask me what the words he overhears in conversations, on t.v. shows and in movies mean.  Words such as “devastation,” “anxiety,” “landscaping,” and others.  The funny thing is, I will give him a definition one time and then days or weeks later he’ll use the words completely appropriately in conversations we have.

Ang’s awareness of the world - and, specifically, the people and conversations around him - blows me away.  I have no memory of being that way myself as a child, but my mom assures me that I was. I also apparently had very strong verbal skills and a crazy-huge vocabulary at a young age, as does my son. 

I suppose the fact that both Dan and I are very verbal, social people probably helps, not to mention that I’m an avid reader and make a point to read to Angelo as much as he’ll let me.  And we’ve never really done the whole “baby talk” thing with him either.  It probably also helps that Angelo has been obsessed - obsessed - with dinosaurs (and animals, fish and insects) since he was two and has been able to name at least three dozen varieties of dinosaurs since that point because we own and read dozens of books on dinosaurs and he plays with all of his many, many dinosaur toys and dinosaur puzzles on a daily basis.  My mom would try to read him his dinosaur books if Angelo was staying with them and he would repeatedly correct my mom’s pronunciations of a lot of their names, like “ornitholestes” and “parasaurolophus.”  She couldn’t believe it!

Funny parting story: All through daycare and into junior kindergarten this past year, whenever Angelo was asked to talk or draw a picture of what he wanted to be when he grows up, his answer was always “a paleontologist.”  But because of his verbal ability, and his frequent habit of making a surprisingly solid case for the things he feels strongly about, his daycare providers and his kindergarten teacher would write in parentheses that they think he’s going to be a lawyer.  

And that wouldn’t surprise me a bit.    

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Tags: kids