Never so happy about being wrong

So I'll skip the weekend soccer games, because its going to just be another cheerleading-fest with my reiterating what incredibly awesome soccer-playing danger-boys I have... both are just great.

But I mean to write about Alexander... he had a water-based article he had to read and summarize... we were working through it together.. and I helped him write "Travis County (and my mom) is suing a house builder" (forget the context for a minute). So he's copying it onto the final piece of paper, and he says to me, "Daddy, shouldn't this 'is' be 'are'?"

So I look at him, then I look at the paper, then I look back at him, then I look back at the paper... and I think "Damn it if he isn't correct". We had originally had no 'and' before "my mom", so the singular "is" was the appropriate word. But then we'd put "and" in there, and poor use of parenthesis not withstanding, that technically makes the sentence plural, and "are" is correct... So he's correct. And I'm thrilled. I'm wrong, thrilled, and grinning inside like an idiot.

So I look at him and I give him a half smile, and I deliberately lie to him and say, "No, I don't think so, I think we want 'is'". And I keep smiling at him, and I wait. And he looks at me, and we keep waiting. And in my mind I'm daring him to argue with me, because that's of course exactly what I want him to do. And he finally says "I think it should be 'are'". And I smile a little bit wider and I say "Why do you think it should be 'are' Alexander"? And he answers "I don't know.... it just looks right". So I pretend to look at it again, and I say "you know, I think I'm wrong and you are correct, those are plural nouns we're referring to, so 'are' is correct, great job Alexander". And he finishes copying the sentence correctly.

So I couldn't believe it, I had made a minor grammatical mistake.. and my *BARELY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD* caught it. He doesn't know why, but he's already read enough to know it was wrong. I've never been more happy to be called wrong about anything ;-)

Anyway, if one of my offspring is this smart at age 7, I think his mom and I are in trouble, we'll have no chance at all against him by age 8. And forget when he and his just-as-smart brother team up against us ;-)