“Daddy … what’s that?”
So this afternoon I sat down to sort some Allen & Ginter minis before placing them in binder pages and my 19-month-old daughter asks, “Daddy … what’s that?”
She hesitated for a second and exclaimed, “Ah … cards!”
Yes, baby. Cards.
The girl is not even 2 years old, but she knows what cards are. She’s seen me fumbling with these things for almost all of her life, and she has some flash cards in her room that she has nearly torn to shreds. My wife and I taught her the word “cards” a few months ago and now she knows what they are.
But this interaction led to another just a few seconds later.
She was curious as heck to see what was in the binder so I sat her on my lap and started showing her some cards from the UD Goodwin Champions mini set.
The first was Smarty Jones, which I explained is a championship race horse.
Second was Albert Pujols, who I described as one of the greatest players the game of baseball has ever seen.
By the time I got to the third card, that of Derek Jeter, her attention was diverted to the stack of empty pages that were stuffed in the front storage pocket. She wanted to play with them all, and thus ended the sorting session.
I guess it’s too early to teach her about my cards. Maybe we’ll just stick to hers and episodes of Little Einsteins for now.
cardboardicons.com 
August 5, 2010 at 7:46 pm
Great story. I have two boys (6 yrs old and 20 month old) and my oldest son is starting to come around when it comes to cards and understand how to handle them, etc. He loves the shiny cards. I try to teach him about trading and he wants to trade for one of my GU cards. So, he tries to give me some Ben 10 cards. I told him once he gets some more cards (sports cards) then we’ll trade. My youngest will look at the card in the top loaders and put them down a few min. later. We have a small binder for the boys to play with (with some Ben 10 and Marvel Superhero Squad cards in them), but I keep the rest of the cards on top of their closets.