It seems as if Oliver does something every day that amazes us. Occasionally, his feats of toddler intelligence rise up to a level that leaves us fairly speechless. We had one of those moments over the weekend, while visiting my parents in Springfield, Mo.

The afternoon we arrived, we took a walk up to the local school to burn off some energy and let the boy run rampant on the playground equipment. We started on the “baby” playground, but Oliver got bored pretty quick. So we headed across the soccer fields toward the bigger swings and slides. As we approached, we had to cross a couple basketball courts. On the ground were colorful maps of all the states and all the continents.

Oliver’s eyes lit up and he ran toward the middle of the map. He plopped down on his knees, pounded his two open hands onto Kansas and yelled out “Blue!” He popped up and sprinted over to Europe, again plopped down and this time called out “Green!” He did this over and over for several minutes, showing us red, yellow, blue and orange states, as well as yellow and purple continents.

We have been working with Oliver on his colors, and he does pretty well with him, but we found this instance to be remarkable because it was unprompted, he showed such glee in blurting out his answers and he was right with his colors 100 percent of the time. It was pretty cool. Here are a few pictures of Oliver on the map:

“RED!”

“GREEN!”


“PURPLE!”


“GREEN!”


And, for good measure, below are a couple pictures of my parents with Oliver. He had such a great time and was really sweet with his “gerr-ma” and “gi-paw.”