FOREWORD: I had written this blogpost a few months ago. Today as she turned 7, I remembered this post.
We were at our extended family’s home. They were having a house warming party. It was an exciting day for this young couple. There were lots of young couples there in the gathering and one with a baby too!! Ofcourse, there was one little girl who was very excited to be there. My youngest daughter, R.
She loves her Nogin uncle and Didi and considers them the spare Mom and Dad for situations, when she’s frustrated with her real parents! 
There are a lot of frustrating moments in the life of a 6 year old child.. Rules like, brush your teeth before bed or wash your hands after using the bathroom…or, the fact that her parents don’t believe her when she convincingly tells them that she finished the whole banana during lunch.
Her mom gets into this investigative mode and makes her spill the truth. Lying feels worse when you get caught, you know! Even a 6 year old feels the pinch of that.
These situations can be really frustrating to a 6 year old. This age is meant for being able to speak your mind out, isn’t it?! Not having to go by the rules…!
Those are the moments, when she convinces Nogin Uncle that he needs to get himself another home, one that has atleast 2 bedrooms.
She was happy now that they have acquired one. She had gone upstairs and inspected her room..the second bedroom. She made sure there is a closet already and that Mom and Dad are not going to tell her that she’ll have to wait until a builder finishes building the closet so she would be able to use the room!
There was another thing she wanted to clarify.
“N Uncle, I could come to your bedroom in the middle of the night when I get a nightmare, right?!”, she asked.
“Sure dear!”, he replied.
Now that all was cleared up…Mom had to just wreck her plan…didn’t she?!
Mom spoke…
“How about school, R?!”
“You still have to go to your school, right?!”,
“Yeah..! but, I could go the school over here!”, she replies without a second thought.
“But, that’s not how schools work. You got to get the paper work in ..to change schools!”, I let her in on the secret!
She convinced me that she is going to talk to her teacher on Monday and clear things up.
Leaving the matter for then..confident, it’s but a silly glitch…she diverts her attention to the baby in the room.
“You know mama…that baby has more bones than us!”, she said.
I heard and brushed it off, trying to cover it with my laugh…like she doesn’t know what she’s talking.
“R, how can babies have more bones than us?!”, I asked her raising my eye brows.
“Mama! the baby’s bone in her head is in four parts … as she grows older those bones will join and become one. That’s when she will have 206 bones like us..Until then, babies have more bones than adults!”, she clarified without any confusion.
As she was saying that..it sort of started get clear in my head. I remembered having known all this at some point of my life…Well..today, that knowledge had somehow saved itself on to some irrecoverable page of my memory.
I had taken this small kid for granted…how would her knowledge be more than what I know. I have raised 4 babies myself. Didn’t I?! I would have remembered that!, Wouldn’t I?!
I managed to Google and find more information on this topic to save myself from further embarrassment.
She’s been hooked to some brain pop kind of database…access of which had been provided by their school, Ofcourse! It has topics on subjects ranging from internet security, bullying, viruses, vaccine, electricity, to bio luminance in word puzzle, to any topic that one can find on the internet.
The elementary database…BrainPop Jr seemed to boring for her so she convinced her elder sisters to give her access to their level of the database.
After days of NO!! and crying and complaining, they finally gave her the access with a promise that she wouldn’t want in on the topic called “adolescence”.
Now, can you imagine telling a child not to touch something, after pointing it out to her, even if you gave her a convincing reason why she shouldn’t?! The curiosity bug had woken up.
So, in my presence, one day..she complained that she’s been barred from clicking on that link!!
I asked her why she wanted to click on that?!
“Mama…Didis always keep talking about puberty..! I want to know what that is too!”, she said.
Ok! go ahead and click on it, I said.
So, she heard the topic for a while and then remarked..
“I don’t understand what she is talking..What does a period mean?!”
“Maybe that’s why Didis didn’t want you to click on that link..because they know that you will not understand it!”, I tried to explain to her.
That was the day she never bothered again with that link..It had gotten her so frustrated. She had heard so many topics of health and had atleast got a peripheral knowledge of what everything meant..even Alzheimer's disease..that she had told me one morning..when I was unable to remember something.
“Mama…it’s because the connections in your brain are getting jumbled up!”,
“As you get older, the connections in your brain starts to jumble and then you forget stuff!”, she informs me.
It had taken me by surprise, what she told me. She had tried to explain to me the name of that disease that happens as one starts to get older..but, couldn’t remember its name. That’s when N had exclaimed
“Oh!! She talking about Alzheimer’s!”
If she could understand how vaccines work, or what cancer cells were..she was sure that she would understand what adolescence meant, right?!
One day as I browsed some of her favorite topics, mostly in the health category..I saw “aging”.. I asked her..
“What does that topic say?”
and she burst out saying..
“You know Mama, you loose 50% of your taste buds as you get old. I don’t want to loose my taste buds..so, aging is not for me!”
If only I could decide that for myself, right now…I thought.
None of the other information related to aging caught her attention. They were all filtered out.
This age is the most wonderful in a child’s life. They can assimilate knowledge like a sponge and have no inhibitions in expressing their feelings on any matter. If something or somebody is not to their taste, it needs to be said. Its an age where black and white appears as is..there is no grey. A very innocent example of which is when she was reading aloud a story that she wrote at school..
She read..
“On Saturday..I got a new bedroom….”
She stopped and said
“Mama, That is fake…I was writing fiction..you see!”, she clarified, lest I accused her of lying.
BTW, about moving schools and home….she texted her favorite uncle the next morning..
“I just changed my mind, I like my home.”, she wrote!
