Kid Logic.

I wrote this last year right before Julia was born.

To prepare for our first child's birth, my husband and I have been doing lots of research – the safest car seats, convertible cribs, folding strollers – you name it and one of us has googled it. But I've found that as I prepare for the physical arrival of our little bundle of joy, I've started remembering long lost thoughts, conclusions and memories from my own childhood, perhaps in anticipation of understanding kid-logic again.

Way back when, my older brother was held back in preschool a year, and my parents explained to him that he'd be repeating the year, and that it was nothing to feel ashamed about. My brother listened and believed them – and whenever he met somebody, the first words out of his mouth were, “I'm in kindergarten now, but I was held back a year in preschool.”

“You don't have to tell everybody you repeated preschool, you know,” my dad tried to tell him after the fortieth time.

“I know,” my brother nonchalantly replied.

My mother turned to my dad. “I just don't understand why he wants to tell everyone that – it's nobody's business!”

My brother and I exchanged glances. He shook his head, knowing they'd never understand. It made perfect sense to me, so I took a chance. “Because then that way everybody knows he's older.”

“Oh,” they collectively replied.

Parents just don't understand, I thought to myself. I'm sure my brother was thinking something similar.

Out trick-or-treating one Halloween, I ran up to a neighbor's house and rang the bell. My mom had made me a black cat costume, and it was quite awesome. A friendly fat lady answered the door and told me she liked my costume. I recognized her good taste and thanked her.

She invited me in the foyer and said, “Hey, you wanna see my pumpkins?”

This would raise a red flag, or at least an eyebrow, for an adult. But I was little, and I really liked pumpkins. “Sure!”

She turned around and showed me her butt. She cupped each cheek as she said, “Here's one – and here's the other!”

I managed an awkward laugh. Adults are weird. I wondered, am I going to think that's funny when I'm old? (Nope, I still think it's creepy)

Eventually, it was my turn to go to kindergarten. To learn how to write, we used to trace letters and numbers inside charts of little boxes over and over on endless sheets of paper. The characters were always dulled a little for proper tracing.

My teacher passed out another worksheet, this time on the number seven. “Everyone, I want you to draw the number sevens as you see them, from top to bottom and fill out the whole page, OK?”

I turned toward the window. I wondered why some people wrote sevens with a horizontal line through their middles, others started them with a downward stroke that they then traced back up to begin the hat that distinguishes seven from the number one, and then other people did both. Some even did neither, and drew their sevens without downward strokes or horizontal lines. It was chaos.

“Amy!” The teacher called my name out sharply. I snapped forwards and looked at the teacher. She was wearing purple, which she always wore, so it must have been her favorite color. With one purple arm, she gestured down at the table to get me to start drawing my sevens. “Trace the numbers exactly as they're written.” Her eyes widened on the word “exactly.” She was annoyed. Whenever I wore my favorite color, tourquoise, I couldn't stay angry for long. I hoped that would be her case too.

I looked down and picked up my pencil. Our purple teacher had gone with the horizontal line plus the downward stroke when making up this worksheet, so this was the way we were going to learn it. I also noticed that the copier had made more than a few lines and dots throughout the page, and some of them intersected, dotted and crossed the sevens. Whenever they did, I went and traced them too. After all, the teacher had instructed us to copy the sevens exactly.

Some of my sevens had upward strokes. Some had both upward and downward. And some had not-quite horizontal lines, while others had small circles around them, like little bubbles floating away. Then I traced the charts themselves as well as the name and date lines at the top. School ended and we turned in our worksheets. The next day, we began with more sevens. I again traced every last line, chart and dot on the page. It looked pretty.

Next thing I knew, my mom was called in for a special meeting with the purple teacher. I stared into the vase of fake violets on the desk, wondering if they smelled or how they were made to look like real flowers. Is that somebody's job, to make fake flowers? Is there a whole factory somewhere that produces nothing but fake vases of fake purple violets?

“I'm concerned about your daughter's motor skills. She's very inconsistent, and even seems to have trouble applying herself to the task at hand,” my teacher said as she passed my mom a sheet of paper. I recognized it immediately – it was one of my sevens. The prettier one, in my opinion. I hoped my mom would like it.

Sometime later, I was sent to another room for part of the day. We sat in a circle with a blue teacher who asked us basic stuff, like what order you get dressed in the morning and what object doesn't belong. This was worse than drawing sevens. I'd happily draw sevens or even eights for months if it meant I could get out of here. I asked the blue teacher, “When can I go back to the other class and draw more sevens?”

“We're just going to catch up a bit first. Then maybe later on you'll be ready to go back,” she replied.

This was worse than I had realized. I had to try and barter with her. “How about if I promise to draw my sevens like everyone else – then can I go back? I don't like these games.”

I was unsuccessful, for now. We got worksheets similar to the ones we got in the big class, but they had fewer things to trace, and came on oval pieces of paper. We went over numbers, and I noticed that these worksheets were higher quality than the other ones. There were no extra dots or dashes on the page, so I raced through as fast as I could, flipped my circle over, and started drawing. I mostly liked drawing horses and dogs. I always finished way before the other kids, so at least that gave me extra time to work on my pictures. By the time we got to the number five, I was sent back to the big class full time. Finally!

These memories roll in and out. Sometimes as I look down on my ever-growing belly, feel the kicks, punches and somersaults, I wonder what kind of baby, child, teenager and adult my little girl is going to be. Will she think Santa brings her lame or cool gifts? Will she take after her father and be more serious and scientific, or will she take after me and be smiley and creative? If I buy her a pink outfit, am I indoctrinating her to a life of poofs and frills, of shrinking violets and thinking she can't do math, of weakness and dependence? Is a pink cigar sometimes just a cigar?

As I look back to try and steal a glance of what's ahead, I will try to remember that kid logic is not always logical, cool Halloween costumes are very important (as is going up to every door with my kids in case of “pumpkins”), and that whatever adults say may have an alternate and literal interpretation – with concrete side effects. I also hope that I'll always be able to bring back little fragments to remind myself of what it was to understand life from only three feet up and with a small handful of years to stand on.