I just asked Cameron to put his Daddy’s shoes away.  He did – he’s a good little helper.  And then I stopped to think about what he’d just had to understand and figure out, and just how amazing it is that our brains put these pieces together.

First, you need to know that Daddy’s shoes were in amongst several other pairs of shoes in a group near the front door.  Our family tends to do a good job of taking shoes off when we come in; we’re not as good about putting those shoes away, so there were at least four pairs collected there.  So Cameron had to sort out a few things: one, which items in the room were shoes, which were Daddy’s shoes, and then grab just those two.  (He did, and then commented ‘Heavy’.)

Then I realized he had to figure out where to put them.  I hadn’t told him where Daddy’s shoes were to go, just “away”.  He parsed that to mean, take them down the hall, and put them in Daddy’s room.  Taking a quick peek, he not only put them in Daddy’s room, he put them in Daddy’s closet, and even on Daddy’s side of the closet.

I got into computer programming because I wanted to teach computers how to think.  I’ve now spent some 15 or so years in the profession, and no program I’ve ever written intuited nearly as much as my not-yet two year old putting his Daddy’s shoes away for his Mommy.  “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made” – Psalm 139:14