he eats sthnakes.

I was looking through a book of animals with my five-year-old nephew, Noah. Each page featured a different animal with a full-color picture and some fun facts. On each page, Noah would say, "Look at that!" and then I would explain something interesting about the particular animal. For those of you with low self-esteem, I recommend looking at a book of animals with a little kid. You will start to feel like a genius for knowing that owls hoot and boa constrictors, uh, constrict.

He got really excited about the snakes. I think he is afraid of them, because all of his toys eat snakes. "Look at my dinosaur. He eats sthnakes. This dinosaur, he eats sthnakes, too. This is Sthnoopy. He eats sthnakes." While looking at the book, Noah said some other things eat sthnakes, like hippos and rhinos. At one point, he turned the page to reveal a mongoose. I paused for a second to think of anything I knew about mongooses, but then I remembered. "Hey, Noah, they eat snakes!"

Occasionally, I would find that some other genius had already educated Noah on a particular animal. He already knew that bears hibernated. So when we got to the beavers, I thought he might have already heard about dams.

"Noah, do you know what beavers do?"

"They beave," he answered immediately.

I started laughing. It's actually quite an intelligent response, and it shows that Noah has already picked up on the suffix -er as meaning one who does whatever the base of the word is. Probably no one taught him that, and he just figured it out on his own from observing other patterns in speech. That's pretty genius right there.

Bonus Information: I learned something else about mongooses while I was looking them up. They make a high-pitched noise called giggling when they mate. The next time I am feeling blue, I will just picture some mongooses being snuggly and giggly. I will probably wait a few years to pass this information on to Noah.