Mensa for Dummies

I often become so astounded at what geniuses my kids are. I know – like you want to read about my smart kids when everyone thinks their kids are smart [except for the checker at WalMart who offers up the info about her daughter who has "a little M.R. in her" the last several times I've accidentally entered her lane] – and if I keep it up, I’m going to start sounding like one of those hob-nobby-full-page Christmas letters about Derek and his 9 MLB offers straight out of high school and Alexandria and her National Merit Scholar brains and thesis on such’n such smarty pant-pants accepted to 3 Ivy League schools by the end of her 5th grade year of home-schooling.

But really, my small people catch on to new concepts in math, read and understand giant words, and are learning to be more responsible with where we keep our homework assignments, what needs to be signed and returned, and even things as simple as completing all morning routines unsupervised before sitting down to cartoons if time allows. I met with my Kindergartner’s teacher for our parent-teacher conference and she really had nothing to say except to show me his fantastic work. And you really should hear some of the tender-hearted prayers my 7 yr-old says at dinner-time with a thankful heart for “the opportunity to play team sports with his friends”. The quotation marks mean he said that very thing… just so you know.

So, I’m left scratching a hole in my head when the same 7 yr-old comes SCREAMING down the stairs right after I’ve officially declared “lights out” because he has stuck a small piece of rubber down into his ear canal… only he simply claims his ear is hurting and he suddenly cannot hear out of it, but with the panic of an imminent bear attack. The information about it being HIS FAULT was not offered. So, I was left to do my own deducing. First, he was able to make it down the stairs without tumbling end over end… AND he was not projectile vomiting. So, I figured it probably wasn’t a burst eardrum. I thought maybe it was stuck water from the bath he’d taken, but Brent arrived with a flashlight and found the exact culprit of his sudden deafness. It wasn’t too far lodged, so I was able to tweeze it out with one, slow, steady attempt. I’m an Operation board-game champ. These things come in handy; I’m not even kidding.

Okay, whatever – I can see how maybe – the thing was shaped like the much larger, much more reasonable ear-plugs Brent uses for hunting and shooting. And I honestly don’t think we’ll be dealing with this again. But two days later, sitting at the kitchen table coloring, a sudden “Aaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!” caught my attention. Same kid. New problem. He “accidentally got a staple stuck in his thumb”. Let me explain something. The fastening of two or more pages of paper was NOT what was going on. This only involved a stapler – and a thumb… and a kid who’d just stapled his own thumb. In my head I was laughing in shock, but I couldn’t outwardly be laughing at my crying child. So, I couldn’t even talk. I just kind of blanked out and stared at him like he was a never-before-seen species of mammal. He pulled out the staple himself and ran water over it and I looked at him and actually had to advise my genius child not to staple his fingers.

Oh well – I’m pretty sure on more than one occasion I put a thing or two into my ear or nostril when I was little. I think it may have involved a screw and perhaps a pinto bean a different time, but I don’t know. I can, however, tell you for sure this is not a reflection on my IQ or the IQ of my offspring. I and my pinto beans could be members of Mensa International. I’m kinda serious.