No Ordinary Beans

The lima bean has sprouted.

Yes, the one in the cup of soil on the windowsill in the sweet girl's room. We planted it a few days ago, and it was tremendously gratifying to see it curling up and out of its soil bed just a couple of days later. When we checked it again this morning (in what's becoming a morning ritual) it's grown noticeably taller, a pale green little bean unfurling and looking just like the drawing of the sprouted bean plant in Anne Rockwell and Megan Halsey's picture book One Bean. Since that was the book that sparked the sweet girl's interest in planting a bean, it's been exciting to see the sprout do "just what it's supposed to," especially since we've been following the book's instructions quite carefully.

Planting a bean has led to all sorts of interesting conversations: about how things grow and how plants "eat,"; about patience growing in us as we wait for things to grow; and about how amazing it is that God has made a world where things grow by relying on other things (soil, light, moisture). We've been talking a lot about trees this week too, and S. has been fascinated to learn that trees produce oxygen which we need to breathe.

It is fascinating, when you stop to consider it all. And it's been occurring to me that we hardly ever do.

That's another conversation we've been having: one filled with laughter. What makes something ordinary? Or extraordinary? The sweet girl recently watched Veggie Tales' Lord of the Beans, a spoof on Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. In a nice nod to its young audience, the magic ring was replaced by a magic bean. At one point Randalf (yes, the equivalent of Gandalf) sings a song that starts "This bean is not an ordinary bean." We got to joking about the song while we were planting our own bean, and now the sweet girl warbles the song for all its worth almost every time we water our sprouting plant. It cracks me up every time, not least because she tries to intone it just like the singer in the video: "This BEAN is not an ORD...I...NARY....BEAN."

"What's ordinary?" she asked me. And then she learned the word "extraordinary" which opened up a whole new conversation. An interesting one, because when you think about it, the word "extraordinary" seems like it would mean the opposite of what it actually does.

Good questions, good conversation, good laughter. All because we planted an ordinary bean, which is doing exactly what it's supposed to do.

Extraordinary!