So Ada and I have been playing the ‘question game’ for awhile now. It started because she eats her blueberries so fast, if you don’t look quickly, you’ll miss it completely. We had this little cart in the kitchen with sliding drawers that you could push all the way through. One morning in January, eating breakfast, I took her little bowl of blueberries, put it into the sliding drawer, and pushed it out like a cash register drawer. Ching! “Take one!” She thought it was hilarious.

We added questions: “What does a cow say?”, “What is the puppy’s name?”, “What is something you eat for breakfast?”. It was our new game. We would go on and on. She loves it.

It has evolved since January. We play in the car. We play in the dining room. Mostly, it is a little white ramekin of berries with a tea saucer on top after dinner. We tap the top of the saucer, tap! tap! tap! Ask a question. It cracks open like a little mouth. ‘Take one!”. The questions now more complex. She asks, “Next question”. Sometimes we ask her to ask a question. (Her favorite is, “What do you drink in the morning?” “Coffee!” Okay, so Hamid has influenced on her on that one). We’ve covered most the topics we can think of. The challenge now is novelty: Rhymes, names, events, what color is…, who’s who, etc.

Our most recent adventure was when Baba Bazorg was visiting. Baba Bazorg, Ada, and I were sitting around the dining room table after lunch. Baba Bazorg had asked a bunch of questions. I had asked a bunch of questions. We asked Ada to ask Baba Bazorg a question. She paused. Fidgeting. I asked her again, “Ada, ask Baba Bazorg a question”. She turned her head and said to us uncategorically, “I’m thinking.” We are stupefied. We raise our eye brows at each other. Baba Bazorg and I both wonder at the same time, “Did she just say, I’m thinking”? When/how did she learn to say that? We don’t say that very often (I can’t even remember an instance). It wasn’t simply parroting. Baba Bazorg works with children on language acquisition, and tells me how complex it is to learn abstract verbs. Wow. She was thinking. And she knew it.

I am really blown away, transformed in fact, by how fully formed we actually are. We have a lot to learn in this world, but we are full human beings from the beginning. We don’t simply get filled up. This is pretty cool!