Indoctrination Has Begun!

So, apparently a couple of weeks before I got here Maya did a project at school called "Around the World" where students made a "passport" and "visited" different countries. My sis told her tonight that I wanted to see it, and when Maya started talking about it I said "do you know I have something very cool from the countries you visited?"

So I had her pull out the PIRATE TREASURE! bag from under my bed. You should have heard her oooooooooooooh. Her face in a nutshell:

We had a great time finding the coins for Mexico, South Africa, and Israel (the countries in the project) and talking about how different they looked and why they looked that way, and looking at the funny letters on some of them and the weird men on others and THE SQUARE on the Israeli shekels (Maya was disproportionately amused by that square). My sister has never understood my love of numismatics but even she was rapt sorting through them looking for South American and Pacific Island countries and suggested I should sort everything in the bag and document which countries I have "so you can find the ones you don't."

Maya was fascinated enough that Angel thought it prudent to remind her that they're Aunt Nina's coins (for right now, anyway) and that she mustn't come into my room and take them out to play with. I added the addendum of "but if you want to look at them or play with them, just ask me when I'm home, and we can look at them together."


"Ooooooooooooooooooooh, okay!! "


So apparently at some point she would also like to take some of them in for show and tell. Her class does this thing called the "Estimation Jar," so I was thinking the next time it comes home with her I should put in a dozen of the really interesting ones, like Hong Kong and Romania, and see if I can indoctrinate an entire pre-K class The school is very much an everyone-knows-everyone kind of place, so I could even ask her teachers if there are countries they'd particularly like to pass around and talk about (as long as they all come home!).