Andrew.

Tonight, during the last Craft night of Adventure week, I was helping an eight year old named Andrew. The craft tonight was to make life-preserver bible verse frames from two paper plates. The project was simple enough, so Andrew really didn't need help, but I needed an excuse to sit by him.

Andrew has very cherubic features: a rounded face, rosy, squeezable cheeks, sizable blue eyes and short, sandy brown hair. Andrew is also the smartest kid I have ever come across. When I say smart, I mean, he talks like a British scholar. His vocabulary is very sophisticated and proper, not just for an eight year old little boy, but for anyone! For example, after helping him punch a hole through his life-preserver frame, I asked him what he was going to do with his finished project. This was his response, word for word: "I do not know. Perhaps, I shall hang it onto my bed post. Perhaps, that may be a good idea. Do you think so?" I stared at him, flabbergasted, with my mouth agape. I just shrugged my shoulders, nodded and took a deep breath to stifle my laughter. I made eye contact with one of his group leaders, sitting in the chair next to him, and her eyes had grown as wide as her mouth was open. She was as pleasantly shocked and entertained as I was.

After I made sure I wasn't going to laugh, I cleared my throat and asked, "Andrew, would you like to pull the string through the hole?" He nodded his head and threaded the string through with his clumsy, chubby eight year old fingers. Then I asked him, "Can you tie a knot?" Andrew shook his head vigorously and said, "No, no, no. I cannot. Please help me." Once I finished tying the knot, he clapped his hands together, smiled gleefully and said, with utmost resolve: "Perfect."

After putting his project away, Andrew and I actually got into a short discussion about words. He asked me what my favorite word was. For some weird reason, the only word I could think of at the moment was "arbitrary." Andrew, in sincere eagerness, asked me what it meant. How do you explain what "arbitrary" means to a child who, according to Piadget's Stages of Cognitive Development, cannot grasp abstract concepts?

The best explanation I could come up with was that it meant something random and unpredictable. I suppose most eight year olds would've looked at me blankly if I had tried to explain a complicated word with complicated concepts, but Andrew placed his chubby little fingers on his chin and let out a contemplative "hmm." I asked him if he knew what random meant. Immediately, his eyes lit up as he replied, "of course! See, when things are in order...it's like counting from 1-10...you know...1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and on and on. But when something is random then it's like not going in order! It's like 1, 7, 10..."

I wanted to steal him right then and make him mine forever.

This is why I love kids so much. You just never know what you're going to get in terms of personality or...lexicon.