Parents and the people who care about children understood how different the child’s reality is from our, more or less, adulterated version. What does adulterated mean? Tainted, mixed, polluted, contaminated. What we call reality is filtered by experience, our ideas, beliefs and fantasies, and yet, filtered is what we see. It is our reality. Adulterated is normal and we rarely pause to consider that what is normal for us is not normal for our children. Not seeing this difference we impose our interpretation of reality on our children, often with painful consequences.

The everyday miracles happen so fast. It’s hard to catch them. Carly is 2.4 years young and communicating with my wife and with Barbora, our au pair, mostly in Czech, and with dear old ta-ta mostly in English without one second of study or memorization. Astonishing!