First off, let me say that my 3-year-old son, Ewan, is an expert on gem identification. Earlier this year, when I was really getting into wholesale sales and getting hanks of ten or twenty chip strands every couple of days, he would love to hold them and wear them all at once. So I started pointing out the gems, and he learned very quickly. Nowadays, he knows about 20-30 different gems.

Now, the story. We home school our 7-year-old son, and part of his schooling one day was to research and answer a handful of random questions. One of the questions was "What's the birthstone for January?" Instead of going to Google or looking it up in a book, Rio tried to find an easier way of obtaining this answer. First he asked me, "Do we know anyone born in January?" I said yes, Grandma D. was born in January. He coyly asked, "What's her birthstone?" but of course I saw right through that and sent him away. He thought about it, then recalled a necklace he had made for her last year with my beads, and how I had talked about her birthstone. So he asked me, "Is it that purple-brown stone?" I said yes.

So he got a bag of the necessary beads, went to Ewan, and asked him to tell him what was in the bag. Ewan took one look, confidentially replied, "Garnet," and Rio had his answer!