Genetics

It's interesting to watch genetics at work. For a long time I have noticed that Thomas inherited my sense of competition and the ever burning desire to win at everything. It has sometimes been a challenge, but he is learning how to lose and still be a good sport about it.

But what has really surprised me is how much Jayna is like me. She is not nearly as competitive as Thomas, but she definitely has my knack for memorization. It cracks me up when I'll hear her say something that is completely beyond her years, and when I ask where she heard it - it turns out that she is quoting a movie. It may have been a movie she has seen several times, or only once. She just has the ability to remember what she hears. Today it went one step further. This morning the four of us gathered to play a Winnie the Pooh memory game ... you know where you have a bunch of cards with pictures and you try to find two that match. Let me say at the outset that the version we play has about 80 cards (40 matches), so this is not an easy test of the memory skills. While we were playing Jayna was eating a grilled cheese sandwich, and it appeared that she wasn't paying much attention - even though this was the game she chose. She would often turn over the same card first and then try to find its match. Then all of a sudden in the middle of the game, she started making match after match. She was finding matches that Rose and I could not have made at the time. Rose and I just looked at each other in amazement, we knew she could remember lines from songs, movies and television shows, but now she was really showing an aptitude for visual memory as well.

I can remember as a kid memorizing Bible verses for Sunday School. Each month there would be a different verse or sometime a whole chapter to memorize, and would handle each one without much trouble. I would go to play rehearsals with dad and sit with Lelia Calvario (the prompter) and memorize the entire play just from listening to them rehearse. There was no effort to it at all, it was just something I could do. Now Jayna is doing just as easily. Fascinating!