Jack is a gifted grandchild. I know. I have another grandchild who is 16 and is an honors student in high school. However, Jack is not even two years old and is demonstrating what I consider great intelligence, and it is all genetic. I realize that there are two-sides of his gene pool, but he gets a vast amount of his intelligence from my biological side.

How did Jack come to into my life? My wife, Ann, and I have been both married before. In her first marriage after having her first child, she had some ob/gyn problem. So she and her husband adopted a little infant several weeks old. That was 31-years ago. Her name is Lindsay. Several decades passed, and Lindsey married her husband, Jason, about four years ago. On July 7, 2010, Ann and I drove down to Indy from Crown Point to be present at birth of this soon to be Einstein-like infant.

One can readily see the family resemblance...

Nearly every week and sometimes more often, we drive down to Indy to babysit. Just recently, Ann had to work the day we generally go to Indy. So I watched him by myself. We were out on his parent's driveway. He was pushing his tricycle around in a large circle. He was committed to that process for about 20-minutes without stopping. Around and around Jack went. As I stood back to watch and wonder what he was thinking, I played with my car keys. Inadvertently, I pushed the door lock, which sounds a beep and the lights blink.

Jack was startled. He looked at me and then at the car. He hadn’t realized that I was the cause of the noise and the lights. Then back to his circumnavigating the driveway. This time, I purposely pushed the door lock button and again he stopped. I didn’t indicate that I was responsible for the beep and the lights. Then I pushed the button again and every 10-15 seconds for a couple of minutes. He went to the front of the car and watched the headlight on the passenger side and watched the blinking headlight and the listened to the beep of the horn. Then he noticed the outside mirror on the passenger side was also blinking. He toddled over to right in front of the mirror and watched it blink.

Then he stood there thinking. The look on his face was like watching, in slow motion, the thinking process of a 2-year old. And then he spun on a dime and toddled around to the driver’s side and looked to see whether that light was also blinking. He then turns to me to say with a satisfied expression on his face, "I thought so."

I was proud of him and said so. Then I showed him my keys as I pushed the button and made the sound and lights flashing. He rushed over to see them and to observe what I was doing. Standing there, he watched me push on the button. That was all that it took; he wanted to do the same thing. It wasn’t long before he was blinking the lights and beeping the horn.

This photo was taken a couple weeks later...

As I said at the beginning of this article, Jack benefitted a great deal from my side of the family’s genetic pool. I realize that my assertion that Jack’s gifted DNA came from my side of the family seems impossible because he possesses none of my family’s physical genes. However, you forget about GOB (Genetic Osmosis Blending). This toddling Einstein has through the process of osmosis absorbed them from frequent babysitting for nearly two years.

What Jack went through 15-minutes with my keys is called a learning experience—one of many of his daily learning experiences. However, I also teach at the college level and want all my students to approach learning with the same inquisitive drive that Jack approaches everything. Someplace as we grow up, learning isn’t the fascination that it once was. It becomes routine and often boring. I hope that my students will get GOB also.

We need to protect the next generation from losing the quest to understand. If it is lost, the next generation will simply go around and around in their own circles of life—and not get anywhere that is meaningful.