quand partirons-nous?
I’ve been teaching Luke more French lately, and he’s been eager to learn, which makes me a happy Daddy. He’s all questions these days too, and has been asking me what a multitude of things are in French. Today he hit me with one I couldn’t readily recall: Appropriately enough on a Saturday (“Donuts with Daddy” is a weekly Saturday ritual), he asked me the French word for “donut,” and I blanked. It worked out okay, though, since we do have a French-English dictionary on the shelf, so I was able to give him a fresh installment from my ongoing the-computer-is-not-the-source-of-ALL-information-and-goodness series and show him that many times (most times?) it’s preferable to actually look something up in a BOOK, as opposed to consulting Wikipedia or Google Image Search, our usual online haunts.
Luke’s mind is an absolute steel trap for anything he can systematize (and many things he can’t, “untethered” bits of information) and at age 4 he’s got his numbers and letters down cold. In two languages. With a smattering of Spanish and sign language thrown in for good measure. I wonder what this means? He’s got an insatiable appetite for geography and astronomy, gets that distant, vaguely desirous look in his eyes whenever I tell him that yes, one day we’ll visit Mali or Norway or Cambodia or Lithuania (he loves the word “Vilnius,” by the way) or Argentina or Costa Rica and wants to know all sorts of facts about these various places, whether they’re hot or cold, if they have mountains or jungles, and the list goes on… Is it just mental calesthenics or is he a born traveler? He’s already the picture of contentedness on our yearly four-hour jaunt to the beach, but we haven’t had the resources to tackle anything more exotic than that, not to mention a 17-month-old sister who isn’t yet ready to join the ranks of the jet-set, so… We haven’t had the chance to test our hypotheses about our son. I’m hopeful that we will one day, though, and soon. A trip to another state, let alone another country, would be the singular event of his young life, and I would bet money that he would love every single minute of it.
The French word is “beignet,” by the way.