Once, we visited my in-law's church where they had a guest speaker. During his message, he mentioned "intellectual snobbery" between spouses. "How many of you sometimes reflect that you know much more than your husband or wife? Well, squash that sort of thought as soon as it comes up because it's so easy to let pride get its foot in and before long, you're too puffed up and proud to be of much good to anybody." I don't remember much of the rest of his sermon but that bit stuck with me. I remember sitting in my seat thinking, "I'll have to watch myself carefully because I do that a bit with Andrew sometimes." I thought of the many times he asks me how to spell different words when he's writing letters, or when he doesn't remember the names of people we know, or people in books or in the Bible and I have to remind him.

Anyway, on the way home, he remarked out of the blue, "I was a bit convicted when he mentioned intellectual snobbery because I do that a bit with you." Of course I asked when. He said that he gets frustrated because I keep asking him to explain the same things about computers or VCRs or DVDs over and over again and he gets sick of explaining it to me when he always remembers these technical things after just one try.

Since then, I've realised that we all probably think we're smarter than other people in different ways, and we're probably right. What's more, they're probably right when they think that they're smarter than us. At home, I have Logan who has always been very good with words and quick to pick up a joke or a play-on-words, with a quick vocabulary. (Once when he was about 2, he surprised a girl at the hairdresser's who was reading to him from a Dr. Seuss book. After silently listening to her tell him about dogs on logs and cats on mats, he pointed at the page and remarked, "That apartment building has a fire extinguisher.") However, Logan's handwriting is naturally shocking, unless he spends hours making it neater and getting himself uptight. His coordination has always been a sore point with him.

On the other hand, we have Emma, who writes with a neat and even hand and can whip up an artistic project in a flash without consulting with us whatsover, yet she forgets names and details and makes herself frustrated because her brother can remember them. She's also a good dancer and has excellent rhythm. We've had several trips in the car when Emma and Blake have been swaying and dancing along to music in their seats while Logan just sits solidly in his seat and belts out the lyrics.

So we all have different skills and talents which doesn't make us superior to anyone else at all and I think the best thing we can do is to work out what they are and then play on them. That might sound like an obvious point to make but I didn't really take it on board until I was well into my twenties and had been through Uni. It's nice to know that we don't all have to be rocket-scientists or brain surgeons. What a strange, unbalanced old world it would be if we were.