Lorena's thoughts, ideas and connections

It is always fascinating to witness the flow of ideas in a kid's mind. This past week I got several fun or cool glimpses of Lorena's.

"Let's go to the movies, let's go see the stars..."

We were in the car, listening -not surprisingly- to the Annie CD (for months her choice has been Annie or Sound of Music). Lorena asked what seeing the stars meant. I stumbled in my explanation of what a Hollywood star is, and gave her some examples of people she might be familiar with , i.e. Julie Andrews.

She replied, "oh, like Patty Collins!". It took me a while to get what she meant and who she was referring to. By the way, that seems to be one of my main jobs as a mother, trying to figure out what they mean. "Patty Collins" appeared in a story I read her from my old Reading book. I just now looked for the quote from the book, "Patty Collins was a famous tennis star".

SIDE NOTE. A couple of weeks ago, I had looked for one of my old elementary school Reading books. Arantxa had been to Robot Building summer camp and she seemed to be confusing machines with robots. I remembered that there was a nice explanation of the difference in my 4th or 5th grade English Reader (compilation of stories). I looked it up, and was going to give it to Ax to read, but Lorena asked me to read a story. She picked "Maria Loves Tennis". (To the people that went to school with me, do you remember the story? Maria runs away from home to go to Patty Collins' tennis camp....). I am now laughing because I am surprised by her memory, but I guess the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. I even remembered, before turning the page, that it was going to have an illustration of mallards. In my defense, English classes were boring and so I entertained myself reading ahead in those readers. At first, I just read to finish the story, but then I went on to the next one and the next one. I read many of them who knows how many times. I always kept my brain listening to big words when the other kids read aloud. That way I could find my way back to where they were reading in case I was called on to read.

Back to Lorena and the same car ride. I noticed the moon was visible and pointed it to the girls. As expected, Arantxa said "very nice, thanks" acknowledging my comment, but probably just barely getting her sight off her book. Lorena, on the other hand, was super excited. This is a short version of our conversation.

She told me that a character in the Space Chimps movie was called Luna (moon in Spanish). They saw the movie a couple of months ago.
I told her there was an orphan orca whale living in our local waters a couple of years ago who was named LUNA.
She asked what happened to her.
I explained it died.
She replied that maybe the same thing that had killed all the little fish had killed her as well.
Me. Fish? Oh, right, at the beginning of the summer we had seen many small fish death and washed to the shore of the lake.

Now, I am going off track again. Our girls are too young to remember Luna, the baby Orca whale who was a celebrity and much followed by local kids. They are also too young to remember Hansa, the baby elephant born in the Seattle zoo. They know of Hansa and have seen her memorial (she died 2 years ago). However, this marks a very clear generational divide. Kids just a few years older, remember and had to deal with the dead of those 2 famous animals.

Same day, later on. We drive past a McDonald's and Lorena points out that the roof looks like it had scales, like those on a fish. I think she is right.

Final comment while still in the same car ride. "There are so many pineapples in Hawaii I think they can bake pineapple pie for a LOT of people".

This next one will be familiar to my Facebook friends. It is, however, tricky to explain. Her wording doesn't make much sense in English., because the differences in the word "lightening" in English and Spanish. In Spanish, lightening is a noun that can be numbered. "Vi 3 rayos", you can say, which doesn't work in English, where it would be more like lightening rods. Not sure about that.

I saw a car whose whole roof was made of glass, it looked pretty cool.

Lorena said, well, that might not be a very good idea. It would break if a lightening rod fell on it. I asked her to explain herself, and she said that it would break it with its point. Oh, I then proceeded to explain that it is not like lightening rods have a point. She replied with, but they draw them like that, with the points!. I could just visualize those zig-zagging pointed rods that they indeed use to illustrate them. Not very eloquent explanation on electricity followed. I get it, she added, do they have batteries inside them, then? More explanations on how they are not something solid and not even a single line.

No wonder I am exhausted at the end of the day!