little explorer

It is a sad fact that my children had to move to the UK to become fans of Dora the Explorer and her cousin Diego. Instead of learning their Spanish phrases in Atlanta, where they might have found opportunity to use them, they are picking up bits of (Latino, not Castilian) Spanish here, where the language they are likely to need next is French. For a real summer, I have come to understand, Britons go to the south of France. Next summer, we will too--if only because Lewis has a conference at which he has to give a paper. Time to figure out how to say all those things I now only read and spell. (The language exam given to PhD students doesn't have an oral component, though perhaps it should.)

The little explorer wielding 'binoculars' in the photo is not Dora, of course, but Iain. I never realized that the most useful skills I would acquire in my teens and twenties would come not from a university, but in the course of endless vacation Bible school experiences. Lewis throws away the cardboard tubes inside toilet paper rolls--or at least he used to, before we moved to County Durham, where we recycle that sort of thing. I hide them, so he won't, and so I can use them for a rainy day activity like making binoculars. I did not have especially high expectations, I admit. And I must confess that Anna was totally uninterested in the project. Thomas and Iain both colored the cardboard tubes and waited patiently for me to tape them together. (When she saw the finished product, Anna decided she wanted some too, of course.)

Iain then totally blew me away. He took the 'binoculars' (which I wasn't sure he'd ever seen before, even) and immediately took them out to the garden. 'I see pears!' he exclaimed, as though the pears were not visible to the naked eye. And so around the garden he went, 'discovering' with much enthusiasm all the things he saw yesterday and which weren't especially interesting then. Go figure. (Eventually I will post the video to Facebook--videos don't work well on the blog. So stay tuned.)

Needless to say, I feel totally justified in hoarding those bits of cardboard.

(By the way, this one's for you, Craig.)