When I picked Kaia up from school yesterday late afternoon, we were walking towards the subway entrance when she suddenly said, “Mummy, it’s raining today.”

I wrinkled my brow and looked down at her. “Pooks, it’s super sunny and hot today,” I responded. “There wasn’t any rain!”

“No, it’s raining,” she said, looking up at me, looking hurt because I contradicted her. “It’s raining on my leg.”

Oh, wait. That’s when I stopped and pulled her over to the side of the sidewalk. I looked down at her backpack, and I realized that a teacher likely did not close her water bottle properly. It was dripping so quickly that the water had already soaked the bottom of her backpack and actually was dripping down her leg! I wiped her leg, then took her backpack off her back, removed the water bottle, and resealed it properly. Then, I turned it upside down to ensure it was no longer leaking, and we went about our way into the subway station.

Toddlers can be so smart, so sweet, so hilarious, and so absolutely illogical and infuriating that you just want to rip all your hair out when they have their monstrous tantrums. But when they say cute things like, “It’s raining on my leg,” it shows you how they are putting their understanding of the world together into words. Kaia comprehends the meaning of, “It’s raining.” She also understands getting wet. But she doesn’t really know how to say that something is dripping down her leg (at least, I don’t think she does yet). So, this was her way of conveying it. I found it really cute and clever at the same time, and a sweet look into her psyche and how she’s making sense of the world in her beautiful, developing 3.5-year-old mind.