Education Starts At Home
In this running series, I’ll document my daughter’s verbal pyrotechnics. My focus will be on less what she says than how and why she says it.
Tonight, my daughter uttered the following sentence: “Mama has good ideas, but I have genius ideas.”
My wife’s idea? Make S’mores using our fire pit.
My daughter’s idea? Eat S’mores made on our fire pit.
She might be overstating her insight.
When I walked into my daughter’s bedroom this morning, I saw this.
I asked my daughter what was going on.
“It’s a library,” she explained.
This evening, she had a book reading at this kid’s library, and she read me The Diary of a Worm. She was a great reader and effectively sold the book’s humor and profundity.
She even assisted me in checking out a book with a pretend scanner. It does my heart good to see her have fun with books.
After picking her up from school on Monday, I took my daughter on a 45-minute car trip into the heart of Greenville. I thought the trip would be a perfect time to get her back on the audiobook train. After explaining where we were going, I gave her the Little House on the Praire play-away she had started a week earlier.
I didn’t have to ask her twice.
The entire trip, her eyes went back and forth from the driver-side windows to the passenger-side windows, taking in the unfamiliar route as she listened to the Ingalls’ saga.
She was transfixed, and I could see her eyes enlarge or contract depending on the book’s action.
When we arrived, I asked her how the book was.
“Good,” she said.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Wolves,” she responded. Fair enough.
In this running series, I’ll document my daughter’s verbal pyrotechnics. My focus will be on less what she says than how and why she says it.
My daughter doesn’t like carrots, but they’re on her plate every night. Typically, we give her one more carrot that she will eat, then talk her into consuming what we really hoped she would eat.
Typically, she adopts the, “How many carrots do I have to eat?” tactic.
Tonight, she set off a rhetorical bomb by going after the carrot’s taste.
She announced, with no other fanfare, “This carrot tastes like the vacuum smells.”
Mission accomplished. After my wife and I had finished laughing, we let her out of that night’s carrot consumption.
The (perhaps) dangerous message we were sending? It’s not your objection. It’s how you object.
My wife’s old high school put on a production of Beauty and the Beast. My daughter really wanted to go. On Friday, she announced that we just had to go that night: “It’s the last show! Tonight at 7:oo!” I told her that if the last time to go to the show as that night, then we couldn’t go. She was heartbroken.
I promised her we would make a visit to the theater this summer.
But six-year-olds don’t always get the details right.
That night, I went on the web and discovered the final show was Sunday afternoon. I snagged two tickets, making sure one was an aisle so my daughter would have a line of sight. I couldn’t go (church responsibilities), but I was glad she and my wife would get to attend.
My daughter loved it. She took the playbill to school the next day.
After dropping her off at school Monday morning, I went to a local coffee shop to work. On their bulletin board, they had a beautiful Beauty and the Beast flyer . I asked for it on a whim and brought home a free poster for my daughter’s room.
A tale as old as time…
My daughter brought home the following book yesterday.
The premise is that the cat doesn’t want to be cuddled…until he does. Then he goes back to not wanting cuddles.
My daughter, who loves cats, is very un-cat-like in her desire for affection.
Today she was flummoxed by a game she was playing. Her melodramatic-the-world-is-crumbling reaction tends to provoke my own parental the-world-is-crumbling-why-do-you-behave-this-way overreaction.
Today, I took a cue from the cuddles book. My daughter was crying. I asked her to come to me and simply gave her a hug: no admonition. She walked away happy…and (most importantly) did not return to the game.
My daughter’s getting started early.
Yesterday, she steered a golf cart around her great uncle’s property for twenty minutes while I worked the gas pedal.
I was impressed with her skills, and we laughed a lot.
Here’s hoping that we do enough of these sessions over the next decade that I’ll be properly inoculated when she gets behind the wheel of a car.
On our weekly trek to the library, my daughter’s desired book–Saving Winslow–was not available in codex form. It wasn’t available in audio CD form either.
All the library had was an Mp3 Playaway, a tiny box the size of a back of cards. The listener can listen to an entire book with just a AAA battery and headphones. My daughter was excited. All we needed was, well, a battery and headphones.
Dollar Tree provided both for less than $3. My daughter walked around with her headphones on and the Playaway in her hands for the next few hours. She was hooked.
My daughter finished the 50-chapter book by the end of the afternoon. When I gave her an online quiz to test her recall, she correctly answered eighteen of the twenty answers.
As an audiobook-phile myself, I was ecstatic to see her take to the book. She let out a whoop when I told her that we could look for more Playaways next week. Today was a good day.
My daughter attended an Easter Egg party at her cousins’ house this afternoon. By hour two, she was sugar-laden and tired.
The party culminated with an egg-fetti fight. Each attendee received a carton of eighteen egg-fetti eggs with which to bombard the party’s other attendees. Soon, the egg-fetti war reached a stalemate. Teams were perched in different parts of the yard. You could cut the tension with a knife.
Then the attacks came. My daughter got hit. Strike one. Someone stole her eggs. Strike two. She got the box back, but all the eggs weren’t returned. Strike three.
She was in tears, so we talked. I assured her that the egg-fetti fight wasn’t worth crying about. She told me to let her calm down, and she would be fine.
And you know what? She was right.
She calmed down, took the fight to the other partygoers, sustained some confetti injuries without complaint, and left the party on good terms with the attendees and the world.
I’m not sure what clicked for her, but something did. I told her I was proud of her. I really was.
Tonight, we entertained my wife’s college friend and his wife. My daughter was enchanted with the wife and played hostess the entire night, showering this guest with art, affection, and relentless attention.
At times, my daughter’s attention was excessive. It made me wonder which was preferable: my daughter never coming out of her room when guests are over or never leaving the guests alone.
“Don’t worry,” I can hear you say. “If you’d prefer your daughter to stay in her room, just wait until she’s ten.”
True enough. I’m glad my daughter was an eager hostess. She made our guests feel loved. That’s no small thing.
Learning Together