There are some days that I wish I could have my own child just so I could warp his tiny little mind. In a good way, though.
If I actually were to have a kid, he would be able to count to at least ten in four different languages (English, French, Spanish and German). He might not know some phrases in English, rather in another language. I probably wouldn't pick something important like, "I have to go to the bathroom," more like "I had a bad dream," or "Turn the television off" so there would be less chance of him running into trouble at school for being peculiarly bi-lingual.
While he would have scientific answers to all of his questions, there would be room for fairies. I do not understand how anyone can have a childhood without any magic in it (even bad magic is still magic). I find it totally bizarre the number of ten year olds with their noses buried in Harry Potter books who will tell you matter of factly that fairies do not sleep in flower buds because there's, well, I can't even bring myself to say it for fear that some fairy somewhere might fall down dead. I still adamantly want to believe.
A child of mine would talk to all mute living things: animals, nymphs, dryads, and stuffed animals too. My bedtime stories were AA Milne, Lewis Carroll and Tolkien, but I would choose to add CS Lewis and poetry.
I could not live with myself having a child who didn't know more than a few lines of Byron and Tennyson.
Poor kid. Everything would go just swell until he got to school. For such a social species we sure get screwed up when we're socialised. Elementary school is OK, because you're still all kids, but after fifth grade things kinda go downhill.
When I was eleven I remember writing that I would be perfectly happy if I could stay eleven years old forever and never have to be around other kids again. To a certain extent I still say I'm right. Turning tweleve is the start of the time in just about everyone's life they would like to forget, right? Eventually you hit sixteen or seventeen and come out the other side of a miserable ride, but those four or five years or so are seldom remembered with joy.
I mean seriously, who had the greatest time in their life in middle school? From what I remember it's like no one could decide whether you were a kid or a grown-up because they'd give you "grown up responsibility" but when you screwed up punish you like a little kid. You thought you were a grown up (because everyone told you you were), so you tried to do grown up things, but everything you did was somehow wrong. Did any of this make sense? NO.
No wonder they keep talking about how fucked up the youth of today are. THEY ARE. They have no idea who the hell they're supposed to be because suddenly they're not supposed to act like little kids anymore, but they're not grown ups because most of them still go home to a babysitter. No wonder they're angry at Grown Ups who seem to be unable to decide who these kids are either.
Man, just let them all be who they are. Stop punishing and medicating because maybe they're being childish, maybe they're acting mature: either way they're still just being twelve years old.
This is why I can't have kids, because the way other people deal with children just about breaks my heart. I worked at a summer camp for three years, and there were maybe three kids who fit what I think of when I think of a kid.
A kid is a shorter being excited to try anything, willing to believe anything, and to tell you what they think. A kid is the sort of person who would look at you and tell you that they know that stars are balls of gas, but that they really believed that the stars were the happy thoughts of every person on the globe and you would want to believe it too. Every kid ought to be like that, but out of the 1500 or so in those three summers, I met only three.
Jane was brilliant: she was eleven and we could talk about books and movies I often can't talk about with people my own age. Allie was ten and would volunteer to do anything- sing a song, teach a game (she taught us games), anything she didn't know she wanted to know, and every time we came to any sort of woody bits around camp her eyes were peeled for sprites. The last girl, I can't even remember her name, Karen, or something like that I think, she was eight and one night she was homesick. My cure for homesickness is an astronomy lesson- it gets them something else to think about, stories and information and it takes just long enough that they want to go to sleep when it's over. After finding the consellation Cancer, she launched into an in-depth medical explanation of the cancer her brother had (part of the reason she was homesick).
To tell the truth, I wonder a lot about them from time to time. They all talked like they had great parents, and I hope that'll help them with the troubles I'm sure they're all going to have when they get a little older. They tell us in training and everything that the smart outgoing kids don't need as much attention, but as a former outgoing kid myself, I disagree. When you're acting in a way that gets people's attention positvely, and suddenly they stop caring and bend over the lump of clay in the corner who could care less whether you're looking at him or not, it makes you wonder if you screwed up someplace.
If raising your hand is a sure fire way not to get called on, you can bet the smart kid in the front row is smart enough to catch on and stop raising theirs, knowing the answer all the same.