Don't Know Much Geography

Actually, Anna knows a lot of geography. Right now she is in a map phase. (Gwammy: she really, really likes the globe you gave her, as you can see.)

Funny globe story: this globe is really neat because you can take the pointer and touch a spot on it, and it will tell you information about that location, such as the name of the country.
Well... Anna was playing with the globe one day and decided to touch some blue country (since blue is her favorite color) MANY MANY times in a row, which triggered "the globe voice" to say the name of the country over and over and over again. Before I could finish rolling my eyes and tell her to please please touch something else, she says:

"Why does he keep saying that??"

in this completely adorable, exasperated voice.

She also has been doing map of the world puzzle and a United States map puzzle and reading a book called The Scrambled States of America. Really , really funny book.

The result of all this is that Anna is frighteningly knowledgeable about the states of our country and the continents. This leads to some fantastic mispronounciations. Did you know that:

• You Mexico
• Avada
• Can-tucky
• Abraska
• and The Crazy Lakes
  

are all part of our country?

This does lead to some tough (if not unexpected) questions, however. The age old: "Why did they put Alaska in the wrong spot?" She can see where Alaska is on the map of the world puzzle, and it doesn't match up with where Alaska is on the US map puzzle. This used to cause her some concern, but now she just lets her friends know before they start the puzzle that Alaska is, infact, in the wrong spot on the US map and that is because there was not enough room to put it in the right one.

A slightly tougher issue with the US map puzzle was: "Why is there a pineapple in the middle of the ocean?". I tried to explain to her that it was an artist's attempt to conjure up images of tropical Hawaii, but she wasn't getting it.
And, uh, oh yeah A--Hawaii's in the wrong spot, too.
That was almost too much for her to take. I could just see her thinking: why didn't they just make the puzzle bigger?

She had a playdate the other day and they started to do the map of the world puzzle. She looked at her friend and said "You do Asia, and I'll start on North America." I was so proud.

At any rate, maybe she'll be the one to finally help me understand why (even though it's actually not) Greenland always looks so big...