Parenting has a ton of experiences, ranging from hard work to brutal tribulations. Every once in a while your kid does something that seems to make all the tough parenting work worth it.

The latest gem that’s keeping the household going came from my daughter, who’s just over a year old. She became a fan of Blue’s Clues at an early age, sitting and watching the program with our baby-sitter’s daughter.

I’ll give a brief description for anybody who doesn’t have a preschooler scheduling an hour of your daytime programming. Blue is an animated dog who runs around a cartoon house, leaving paw prints on objects for his live-action master to find - blue’s clues. When we come across one of the paw-printed items, a group of off-screen kids shout “A clue, a clue!” The man will ask them “Where?” Then the children respond, “Over there.” The guy in the show trys to find all three clues and figure out what they mean - simple and entertaining.

It was kind of a surprise when my wife came home and told me that our little girl would always say,” a clue a clue,” when they were getting into the car. It was very sweet, the “L” had a touch of “R” in it and the end had an exaggerated “ooo” sound. In perfect form, my wife would ask our daughter where the clue was and she’d respond, “over there.”

It didn’t seem like such a big deal at first, we’d taught the kid how to say all kinds of things. We taught her that her favorite toy was “bear,” and the dog’s name was “Peachee.” Still, we couldn’t figure out why she saw a clue in the garage.

Then we discovered something very interesting. The big bag of dog food for our little bitty dog had a big paw print by the logo -“A clue, a clue!”

That’s right, she’s a genius -the wife’s picking out what she’s going to wear to the Nobel Prize ceremonies. It was always fun when our daughter learned something we showed her, but now she was putting together pieces for herself. If you show her a paw print, she knows that’s a clue. It was a great moment, until it dawned on us that our little genius was always in record mode.

That’s where the hard work starts again. That cute little moment suddenly raised a bunched of questions.

Was she learning things we didn’t want? What did she learn when mommy and daddy were tired and had a fight? Is she learning all the words on the TV shows we watch? How about the violence in a movie or a prizefight?

Even worse, was there something I wanted my daughter to learn that she wasn’t seeing? Did she see me read, or exercise? Were we showing her how to pray? Did the kid notice when the family was happy and showed their love?

It sounds like I lot of trouble just to get a single moment of brilliance, but that’s parenting. Shouldn’t try it if you’re not ready for the work.