My pre-kids self was more hipster than hipster. I was too cool to be a hipster. Or I was a hipster before it was cool. One of the two. Point is, I had pretty strict notions about what was considered cool and funny, and what should have been considered a sign of the downfall of civilization, and a call for our alien overlords to finish the job they had started when they wiped out the dinosaurs and the Mayans. In any case, it would have been safe to assume that "From the mouth of babes" type of literature would have been the first sign of the apocalypse.
But people change.
Now that I have kids and my identity is no longer defined by the need to find myself on the cultural supremacy ladder, I can open a book like Preschool Gems: Love, Death, Magic, and Other Surprising Treasures from the Mouths of Babes and enjoy the quotes by the children, even smile when I see the innocence, and the purity in the words.
See, preschoolers are not just like adults, only less knowledgeable or less sophisticated. No, these kids are as complicated as us, only we're been conditioned to think within boundaries. We've been conditioned to make too much sense!
And this is why a book like Preschool Gems is in fact not the beginning of the end of civilization, but the hope we need. There is a future for us after all, and I, for one, believe that children are our future.
I put below some of my favorite quotes from the book, written by Leslie McCollom, a preschool teacher who didn't want these great words to be lost. Her Twitter account, @PreschoolGems, continues to collect gems as long as preschoolers continue creating them.
"I saw a puddle in the shape of a heart and no one harmed me, so it was a good day."
"My mom lived in the nineties."
"Are you still fallen in love with me?"
"This isn't like taxi drivers to paradise or something. You have to get on your own horse and ride."