just got this email...

Hi Sarah and Jay!
I have been hearing great things about our former Shoe preschoolers. I haven't heard anything from our Simon though?Our new group of kids--they are great. but...none have impressed me like Simon. I'm not even talking about his intellectual ability...but his amazing heart.I'm trying to teach that to our current group. Sure Simon was impressive cognitively but it was his ability to see and feel things from another's perspective that amazed me.Please update me! Let me know how everything is, with you, Jay, and Simon! I am eager to know!
shamaurie

How would you have answered this question?

Simon's homework assignment is to draw something that starts with the first letter of his name. He is at the kitchen table thinking about what to draw; Jay and I are in the living room.

All of a sudden he appears in the doorway:
"How do you draw a sacrifice?"

Sorry, George Lucas

Playing with Uncle David & Aunt Marnie, Simon used small sticks as pretend water pipelines that ran to various toys in the basement. As he built the pipelines, he directed the placement of various toys to make sure they were getting adequate water. One of the toys at the end of a water pipeline was a minature R2D2 action figure.

Marnie: "Oh look, R2D2 is getting water."
Simon: "No, that is a water tank."
Marnie: "I think it's R2D2."
Simon: "No. Water tank."

Two of each?

[preface: yesterday I told Simon I had a visit from baby Seger at work. Simon asked if his mom was there too, I said, well, yes, one of his moms was there. Seger has two moms. Simon accepted the information at face value.]

[other preface: Simon has been planning to marry Natalie ever since they started kindergarten.]

Me: who did you play with at recess today?
Simon: Emily [same answer he's given for the past few weeks]
Me: are you going to marry Emily now?
Simon: Well, I think I can marry both of them, and we can have two moms in our family. And two dads.

on a need to know basis

Simon: I need to look something up on the computer.
Me: you NEED to?
Simon: yes.
Me: what would happen if you didn't look it up?
Simon: Well, then I wouldn't know it.

It's not only about literature..

simon is wearing a shirt featuring a dog riding a skateboard.

Me: Do dogs really ride skateboards?
Simon: no.
Me: then why do you have a dog riding a skateboard on your shirt?
Simon: This is a fiction shirt.

Next up, Hopper

Simon has drawn a grid of black lines on a piece of paper. He is coloring in the rectangles with different colors from his crayon box.

He shows me the page:

"This is like a Piet Mondrian except not with only red, blue, and yellow."

(turns out they're learning about Mondrian in art class...)

I've never heard of this shape.

Simon hands me a oval/circlular shape he's cut out of an index card. He's drawn a smaller oval/circle in the middle of the shape.

He asks me to cut out the middle circle.

Me: Oh, so it'll look like a bagel!
Simon: No. So it'll look like an elliptical ring.

We've tried to explain about infinity...

Simon is fascinated by really large numbers.
He's been typing things into Google, trying to get lists of large numbers. He started with:
very large numbers

and

extremely large numbers.

Today I came in to check on him and he'd typed into the Google search bar:

last number in the whole wide world.