From the “My parents will react to this with a resounding, ‘well duh!'” department, to which I can only claim the defense of being an inexperienced parent, comes the happy revelations not only that Siena is turning into an small autonomous agent (also known as a “kid”) but also that she is learning many things that we, her parents, never taught her.

Some of these learnings are things we wouldn’t teach her if she lived in a bubble under our constant watch, but it’s OK, we’ll deal, and in the end she probably isn’t really harmed by knowing them. (Exhibit A: Dora the Explorer and her theme song.) But by and large, given that she spends more waking time at school than at home with us, it’s only natural to expect that she’ll end up learning more from others than from her parents. Which is kind of sad in a way, but also good because it means I don’t have to learn all sorts of details about dinosaurs or state histories all over again. For the most part.

The most amusing example of this in the past few days has been the following ditty that Siena sings randomly, and to which I only learned all the words just last night:

A peanut sat on the railroad track,
It’s heart was all a-flutter (here Siena pats her chest).

Around the bend came number ten,
Whoops! (here she claps her hands) Peanut butter!

Now, we could explore the myriad reasons why the peanut’s heart was fluttering (I think he was daydreaming about a certain almond acquaintance, mom claims he’s aware the train his coming down the track), but perhaps the best reaction is just to say, “Isn’t that great?” and cheer that Siena is learning some fun things at school.