Think Thank Thunk

So it’s 9:00 and my 5-year-old is stalling her way through our nightly bedtime ritual of taking vitamins. This is how it goes:

Me: (filling the dishwasher) Take your vitamins.

Nora: Yes dad. (mumbles singsong nonsense but makes no move toward vitamins–of course I don’t notice this because it takes everything I’ve got to focus on filling the dishwasher)

Me: (5 minutes later) Nora. Are you taking your vitamins?

Nora: I just don’t like chewable calcium.

Me: Just chew ‘em up and let’s get this over with.

Nora: Yes dad (mumbles singsong nonsense)

Me: (This time I’m on to her) Nora! Chew!

Nora: (Chewing, humming, she singsongs), Cumbersome, cumbersome combersome . . . Dad, do you know what “Cumbersome” means?

Me: (curious, I tear myself away from the Tetris game of trying to fit bowls into the top rack) What does “Cumbersome” mean?

Nora: (casually breaking off a humming tune) It means “heavy.”

Me: (trying like hell not to look astonished . . . and then wondering if she knows what “astonished” means) Where did you learn that?

Nora: Word Girl . . . Do you know what “Vicious” means?

Me: (now totally distracted from the tasks at hand) What?

Nora: “Mean.”

Me: Yep. That’s cool. (But thinking–Holy crap!)

I’d seen her up at the computer, playing around with the Word Girl site–watching the flash videos, playing the games, clicking here, clicking there. Her big sister taught her the ins and outs a few days ago.

But I didn’t think she was actually LEARNING anything!

Apparently, I was wrong. We spent the next fifteen minutes talking about the adventures of Word Girl. It took me that long to realize she’d stopped taking her vitamins and just prolonged her bedtime.

Curses! Foiled again by that meddling Word Girl.