The Girl has been working on puzzle maps at school, learning, continent by content, states and countries — Europe, North America, and South America down, currently working on Africa.

Almost every day since then, we’ve gone over countries and states, an effort to remember what’s learned and add new states so she can finish a continent and bring home her hand-colored map.

In Poland this autumn, she drove everyone crazy showing all the maps she knew. Only Dziadek, a former geography teacher, could sit down and listen to her, time after time, catalogue the shifting geography of an ever-changing world. “Many of those countries didn’t exist when I was born,” I think as she names them for me; as for Dzaidek, even Poland was a different country when he was born. Those nuances are lost on L as she points and names, proud of her memory.

As a reward, though, we agreed to buy the Leap Frog interactive maps for her when she completed Europe, and they arrived today.

Endless fun on the horizon.