Presidents and Placemats

So Jacob is sometimes referred to around our house as Rainman. You see, since an early age Jacob has had this urge to learn things and ask TONS of questions. For example, when he was a toddler we had to keep all of the packaging from the Thomas the Train characters he received because he wanted to learn all the names of the Thomas characters he didn't yet have. His famous line from that era was "I don't know 'member his name?" Translation: which character is this? That morphed into learning all the NASCAR drivers. We'd only let him watch a race (at the time) for 15 minutes. While some thought it was an effort to reduce tv time, it was actually a survival tactic by his parents. For you see, during that 15 minutes, he would blitz us with, "who is #18, who is #48, who is #99?" until he had them all memorized. Zack (Jennifer's bother-in-law captured this useless knowledge in an epic video that was probably youtube worthy).

http://zackmansfield.com/post/119922531/fun-with-numbers-nascar-style.

From there, Jacob learned all of the states in the U.S. both by location and the shape of their borders. The culmination of that effort was his ability to tell you every state you'd drive through if you gave him a starting point and a destination for any route within the continental U.S. I'll never forget the look on my father-in-law's face when Jacob (having just turned 5) accurately listed all the states that border Missouri (give it a quick try...I'm willing to bet you cannot do it). I'm sure there have been some other Rainman moments over the last 6 years, but we're currently peaking with the most recent phenomenon.

Quickly, getting back to the title of this entry, I should note that most of these passions have developed from the use of place mats (yes, place mats) that Jennifer has purchased for no more reason than to give us something to talk about with the kids over a mundane meal. I should also put the disclaimer that we don't really care if Jacob, Jensen or Janie Grace know all their states or the 50 presidents as a 4 or 6-year-old, but if they want to learn then we'll go with it.

So the 50 presidents...Jacob can tell you every president's name (including middle name/initial), recognize their face, which number they were, and the president that preceded them or followed them in office. However, the kicker is that you can name any year since GW took office and I'm 95% certain he'll tell you who was in office during that year. I really have no interest in exploiting my son, but this one is really tempting me for youtube just to see if it could go viral. If I said, "1852", right now to him, within 10 seconds (and sometimes in less than a second) I'd hear "Millard Fillmore". It's uncanny and has brought about more than a few smiles in the last week since he's really developed the mastery.

The beauty of this is that Jacob doesn't really think it's all that unique that he can can do this. He just thinks it's normal and rolls with it. There's no doubt that he'd rather watch Derrick Rose dunk a basketball or Jimmie Johnson drive in a circle, but it's fun to see him wanting to learn things and showing an interest in looking past himself into a world that is so much bigger than his little life. The challenge will be for us...what else can we find on a place mat and how else do we continue to fuel his fire??!! (And trust me, when he claims to be unable to learn something for a school assignment down the road...his Rainman skills can and will be used against him.)