Five-Year-Olds and Magic

Like a lot of children her age, my daughter is fascinated with magic. She is always trying new things to find her magical talent.

The magical talent she talks about most often - consistently for a few months now - is "making things stop turning". She pushes a ball (spins a top, sets anything in motion), does a magical finger motion and waits for it to stop.

Someday she's going to take a physics class, learn about inertia and come to a sad awakening. For now, though, she is convinced there is a causal relationship between her magic and the laws of physics. She has an answer for everything - it's pretty funny.

(Sometimes I feel like little children are constantly looking for magical connections between themselves and things happening around them. When you don't understand how things work, it's not such a far-fetched idea that stomping your foot might make a clap of thunder. "Hey, I blinked just now and the light went off! I KNEW IT! Okay, let's try again..." K is almost old enough to know better, but she's still looking for the superpower she knows must be there somewhere.)

Today she did some magic on my hands:

“(does magic trick) Look! Now you have new fingers!”
“These are the same fingers I had before.”
“You THINK they are, but they’re really not.”

She is at this great age where she knows that some things are pretend and yet she still kind of believes them anyway. We often have discussions about which one of us is more magical. I say she learned all her magic from me, she says she taught herself. Classic generational argument. :)

A while back she told me,

"You're not magic like me. You can't do this." (magical hand gesture)
"I am, look." (magical hand gesture)
"But there wasn't any magic there."
"There was, but you couldn't see it, because only magical people can see my magic."
(instantly) "I can see it! It's purple! And mine is pink."

So I see that the emperor's new clothes principle works perfectly even in today's world. And K and I are both, perhaps, magical.