AND Louis Vuitton! AND Moet!

When they re-release this I will be happy:

The original. The best. ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTES

Whereas I *LIKE* minty lemon orangina lychee-cherry choco-frappi-mocha in my shampoo.

Which, isn't all of that rebranded from this:

What I miss aren't the original scents with an -s. I miss...

I'm not really sure when I would have been taught the letters etc., especially in any way that required rote memorization. Certainly my parents never did this, my nursery school and pre-school never did either, and yet by kindergarten I knew them.

My pre-kindergarten reading memories, such as they are, are of me actually reading. I don't mean like reading Dostoyevsky (whose works, by the way, I find boring even as an adult. I have never finished and probably will never finish a Dostoyevsky tome), but, you know, See Spot Run, Clifford, some easy Dr. Seuss, like…

I remember learning how to add. But not how to read.

And yet, I didn't have any of those things (my parents were educated and loving and all that, just busy) - no educational videos, no speak & spell, none of that, and yet I learned to read before school.

I wish I could know for sure if I was "taught" somehow, but I don't remember it, my mom has passed away and my dad…

Yes, I'm just saying, I have no memory of being taught to read or even being really read to. I know both my parents worked and didn't have a lot of time for that, and even they were quite shocked that I just...could read. I'm not saying I wasn't taught, maybe I just don't remember. I have few memories of day…

I can't speak for the person you are replying to, but I don't remember my mom reading to me much. Sometimes, she surely must have, but my mom worked and just didn't read to me all that much as she had to work hard to keep us afloat (dad also worked hard, but his income was not enough).

And I wish my parents had praised more of my achievements (along with effort, that's good too). Because I feel like since I never had to put much effort into doing really well at school, I never got praised for my great achievements because they didn't come with hard work, most of the time. They didn't have to. That…

I think by mentioning what they were able to do at that age, it's a way of giving backstory to their weird and conflicting feelings about their self-image today. It's not idealizing that time but rather than drawing at that time to explain why they are who they are today. I know I do.

Heh, and I felt like I was special (I wasn't reading the New Yorker at 4 but I was reading at 3, that's not like genius but it is pretty smart), my parents adamantly didn't tell me I was, and so I felt like "if I'm a normal kid why do I stick out so much? I FEEL special, but if the grownups are right and I'm…

It can lend acknowledgement to an inner feeling or intuition a kid has, if they are truly intelligent/bright, that they are. Otherwise, as I wrote above, it can feel like gaslighting to the kid who is smart, has figured out that they're smart, and sticks out because of it. Like, "you're not special, you're like…

As another "smart kid", I agree that it's silly to pretend that smart kids don't know they're smart, like they don't notice that they get the answers and figure things out faster than others or that they can see how sometimes adults are wrong. We do know, and steadfastly ignoring that, like it doesn't exist and can't…

re: no kid learns to read, they are taught. I'm curious if other people remember being taught to read. I don't. Obviously somebody or some people taught me, I agree no kid just...learns, but it happened before kindergarten in that time when memories are few and far between and hazy when they do exist. So it *feels*…

Me neither. I didn't mean to come off as "you dumbass", I was genuinely curious about why one would burn boxes. I'm also from the country and my dad takes them in as recyclables for free. He has to drive to the dump anyway so it's not any different to take them in along with the other trash.

That's cool. I get that. But, I grew up in the country too and we have no municipal trash collection. So we have a dump permit but they take paper and other recyclables free of charge.