How Meaghan Learns

There’s something special about our third child. Oh sure, there’s something special about each one of our children, but in Meaghan’s case, this is one of those interesting and unusual things that we keep observing. It’s how she learns, how she figures stuff out.

I guess it all started when she learned how to walk.

When she was a baby, she was one of those “good” babies, content and smiling most of the time, happy enough just to be around. As she got more mobile, she got more curious. She seemed to get more sure of herself, too. She never really seemed to get very frustrated. If she couldn’t do something, she’d try once to see if she could, and then she seemingly accepted the fact she couldn’t do it – for now.

Although she was perfectly healthy and was born more than a decent weight (8 pounds 4oz) she grew at a snail’s pace and was quite small. Still is. But back then, when she was learning to pull herself up with her Dad’s slight help, when she insisted on eating everyone else’s solid food before her own teeth had broken through, when she was eleven months old and could walk unassisted right under the kitchen table, we got more than a few surprised looks.

Especially when another year or so passed and it seemed like Meaghan didn’t really speak. Outsiders worried about it more than we did, for we knew at home that she could say a few words when she wanted to. I guess she just didn’t have much to say, for it seemed one day Meaghan started to speak in full sentences. Even then she was brief.

It’s this mix innate curiosity and assurance that I find interesting. We’ve always said she just doesn’t do things until she knows inside herself that she can do it. I think she puzzles it out in her head until she figures out what she needs to know, like when she first rode a bike.

The very first time Meaghan sat on a bicycle and tried to pedal away after her siblings, it didn’t work. I tried to explain how she needed to practice, there was balance involved and maybe we needed to adjust the bike to her shorter legs. She would not be consoled and refused to even so much as look at a bike. The next summer rolled around and we had decided not to push it, she was still young and there was plenty of time for her to learn.

But one day, I watched her out the window. She had taken the bike and backed it carefully up a small hill next to our driveway, the spot we used for turning around. The other kids were off playing elsewhere in the yard. She put the bike partway up the hill, balanced it carefully, put one foot on the pedal….

And took off.

Within two weeks, you’d never know she had just learned. It’s like that with everything she does.
Look at her baking adventures. One day I was sitting here, and she mumbled in my ear about wanting to make a loaf of bread. Next thing I know, there’s a loaf coming out of the oven. I asked what recipe she used, and she told me she remembered watching me bake bread and basically winged it.

It was the best bread we’d had in months.

Just as recently as last June, Ron and I were discussing her writing ability, or lack of it. Her handwriting was illegible, and that was assuming the words were spelled correctly, and a good portion of the time they weren’t. We decided to leave it at that, for we had noticed with the older two, their writing seemed to suddenly improve once they hit around 13 or so.

Yesterday and today, she has suddenly become interested, or at least more interested, in the computer and the online world. She has been sending out regular emails to friends and her sister, when before, she might not check her email for a month or more.

She even started her own blog, and I never even helped. I think Sarah was a little miffed that Meaghan found a spot, set it up and changed the layout all by herself. She showed me the entry she was working on for tomorrow. It’s spelled correctly and has good grammar, for the most part. She was even writing skits for camp, two pages, when before it was all I could do to coax a paragraph from her.

Even last week, she said to me she’d like to rearrange the living room. I hemmed and hawed, thinking of the moving of heavy furniture, and even worse the cleaning under it and especially what if the furniture didn’t fit where Meaghan wanted it to go? I put her off, suggested she draw it out on graph paper, but eventually I agreed.

It looks better her way.

I guess it is all simple to her. If she can’t do something, she won’t. When she can, she does. She doesn’t pause to ask questions, or narrate her way through like Sarah does, and she rarely asks for help in anything, really.

I don’t get her sometimes, and I think she knows. “It’s okay, Mom,” she’ll tell me with a patronizing pat on the shoulder. “You just go sit down.”

She’s like her father that way.