I think of that often when I sit back to marvel at my favorite young man.
Our flashback photo for the day is one of those that has always struck me as such. You see, when Wonder Boy was about 2-3 years old, he developed a love for puzzles that has continued through today. Watching him assemble puzzles was one of those first moments that struck me on how differently he processed the world around him.
I know I've told this story before, but it has always struck a chord with me, so I hope you won't mind my repetitiveness.
One day, much like the one pictured below, we were working on a nice, big puzzle sprawled across the dining table. He was working on a section in the middle while I was trying to get the border pieced together. At one point, I turned to watch him work away and I noticed that he had two pieces that were obvious to me that did not belong together as they were colored differently. So I asked him why he he thought they would go together? He pulled them apart and showed me that the shapes did indeed look like they MIGHT just fit. And I asked him if he looked at the color and he said no.
It was a very simple exchange, but it has stayed with me all of these years. I think it was the first time I understood just how differently he was looking at things! Where I was looking at colors, he was contemplating edge geometry. Neither was right or wrong, just different. It was a wake-up moment for me. This child who seemed such a huge part of his father and I ... he was unique, he was all his own.
That little realization has grown exponentially over the years! Our Wonder Boy has grown literally and figuratively into a perfectly unique version of himself. His eyes look a little bit like mine, but are not some exact copy. He has a mischievous grin that so reminds me of his father, but again, it's not exact. He's a home body while Wonder Dad likes to be up and about and I fall somewhere in between.
These days, it's no longer a surprise to me that his mind works in ways I can barely grasp. In fact, most of the time, I love for him to sit down and tell me what he's working on and why and what he gets out of it. Take this morning for instance. Most mornings, he prefers to lounge with his pups until to get ready for school, but today I found him focused on his computer as soon as he finished his breakfast. When I asked him what he was working on he showed me the graph you see above. In case you do not automatically guess what that is about, he told me it was "a representation of a 3D function on a 2D plotter." You see, he's putting together a presentation for some junior members of the Computer Science team at school so they can learn how to code these types of algorithms for competition.
Personally, I just thought it was pretty.
And THAT made him shake his head when I told him.
It's a wonder that we are able to communicate. Our minds do not work the same. But I am oh so thankful that we can because then I get a glimpse into a whole different world!
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