MamaStories

Amie started asking “Why?” a couple of weeks ago and hasn’t stopped. Some of her why-s are genuine questions, asked out of curiosity, but many (more, I suspect) are not. It’s fascinating and annoying and often a challenge. I find myself in conversations like these:

• Amie, please don’t make that mess.
• Why?
• Why do you think?
• (Silence. Reads her book. Obviously wasn’t a genuine question. Let’s pursue:)
• Hmmmmm? Why do you think? Amie? Why do you think?

Or:

• Mama, why do you need a spoon?
• Why do think?
• I don’t know.
• Yes, you do. Why do you think I need a spoon?
• To stir your tea?
• Yes! See, so you knew why all along. So there was no need for you to ask why at all!

My response depends on my estimation of her reason for asking. These are many, and not readily discernible!

1. She wants to know: e.g., “Why is it dark?”
2. She’s curious about the wider topic: “Why is X crying?”
3. She’s not really interested, she’s just asking for the sake of talking/pronouncing words/uttering sounds, like singing
4. It’s a game, she’s playing with language and that most intriguing and versatile of words (why yes: “why”)
5. It’s a reflex, like in the examples above (mostly when she just asks “why?”, without elaborating the full question)
6. She just wants to get attention and the annoying aspect is unintentional
7. She wants to get attention by being annoying
8. She just wants to annoy

Can you think of other reasons? I’m sure there’s many more, just like there are many possible responses:

1. “Because our part of the earth is slowly turning away from the sun and so the sun can’t shine on our place anymore and it gets dark. Then it’s night. But tomorrow morning our place will be turning back to the sun and so it will become light again. Then it will be day again. Here, wait, lemme me look it up in this en-cy-clow-pee-dia.”
2. “Why do you think?” as a conversation starter: “Because she banged her knee? Remember that day when I got that booboo?”
3. “Is that a real why? Do you really want to know?”
4. “Why do you think?” as a Ha! Gotcha back! But this doesn’t work very long (”No, Mama, what do you think?”)
5. “Why what?” “I don’t understand your question, please eee-la-bo-raate“. This might make her understand that the why-question must be respected and asked in earnest.
6. “Why are you asking? Is it because you need a hug? A kiss? A gobble?”
7. “Because that’s how they made it.” Also not a why?-stopper for long (and rightly so?)”
8. “Because I said so!” This often deserves a new why in return.
9. “Because Mama knows best!” This is sometimes legitimate, e.g., to “Why should I hold you hand on the busy street?”
10. “That’s a really stupid question!”: this in my view is a no-no. She might think she is stupid for asking it! A stupid way to go, really.
11. “That’s enough questions for now” or “I’m all out of answers”.
12. “Mama can’t answer anymore, sweetie, I’ve got a headache.” If followed by a genuine “Why?”, answer truthfully. If not, go to next alternative:
13. Silence (turn up the radio volume)

There must be a lesson in this… I guess it’s live with it, make the best of it, and make sure you don’t discourage the real why questions.

But then there’s also this:

Listen, I’m a philosopher (I alway say: “student of philosophy”) by training, and what really, really bugs me about this incessant why? is that often it is the wrong question. What Amie wants to know is not why?, but how?!

It’s the difference between causes and reasons, people!

• How does it work? = what causes this to happen? “The lever pushes the wheel. That’s how it turns.” (Domain of science and technology)
• Why does it work? = what motivates something or someone, what is the purpose? “The turning wheel makes the toy cars go round. That why it turns.” (Domain of morality and psychology)

Now how am I going to explain that one to a two-year-old? I guess I could start with:

“Why? Oh, you mean how come? Well…”

I think that potty-training was Amie’s first real challenge. It’s not like “learning” to walk and talk, is it? Those come naturally and very gradually - for both the kid and the parents. Going on the potty is the first fully learned skill, one that requires physical training, and patience and a resilience to failure for all concerned.

There seem to be two general schools of potty training. Each is a combination of two approaches to the child’s access to the new (the potty) and to the old (the diaper).

With regard to the potty:

• 1. the let’s-first-get-acquainted school: introduce the potty very (too) early on, very gradually; once she is ready, she will know what it is for and will naturally go to it.
• 2. the wow-look-what’s-this! one: once you know she’s ready, make a big deal about buying and placing the potty and start right away.

You can combine this with two types of access to the diaper:

• A. the safe-and-easy approach: keep the diaper on, let the child go to the potty by herself, or practice a routine of visiting the potty regularly.
• B. the what-the heck-is-going-on?! school: once they’re ready, take away the diapers and make them experience the discomfort of wet underpants.

We started out by following a combination of schools 1 and A. We got this fancy Boon potty (*) when Amie was around 1 1/2 and it stood in our bathroom for months before she was really ready. She would sometimes sit on it, but for fun and play, which is exactly what school 1. encourages. More often she would sit on top of the lid and read books.

The time came. She seemed ready, announcing that she was peeing and even going to pee, complaining about a wet diaper, etc. Preschool was in the nearer future and family members were noticing the continued presence of diapers.

But Amie had lost all interest. We could not entice her to sit on that potty, not even as a game - while keeping our fingers crossed that we would strike lucky. Even when she was clearly ready, she refused. Not even our repeated observations about big girls going on the potty helped. She’d cleverly point out that she was “a little bit big and a little bit small.” Even the model of Boo - her favorite Boo, from Monsters, Inc - going on the potty wouldn’t make her try.

That potty just wasn’t fun anymore! The novelty and adventure of it had simply worn off.

Still sticking with school 1. we switched to approach B. We put her in underpants when she was at home. She didn’t like that at all! She often asked for a diaper, but I would talk her out of it. Still, it didn’t feel right because I could see she wasn’t sure of herself, and couldn’t relax. We would have 50% success, but she would go to the potty reluctantly and renew her requests for a diaper. Just as often she would relax and have an accident, and then she would cry, heartbroken. This was undermining her confidence: not good!

Exit schools 1. and B. We put the diapers back on and tried to break the curse of the boring potty by introducing an adaptor for the adult potty, but she didn’t feel comfortable on such a wobbly contraption, which required the added fuss of a stepstool.

I thought it best we take a break: we stopped our efforts and I hid the potty for over two months.

When I reintroduced it - a la school 2. - she finally got on track. We placed it in a different place: our common bedroom, put lots of books next to it, and made a big ado about her own roll of toilet paper. We mixed approaches A. and B., letting her decide. Sometimes she asked for panties, sometimes she preferred the safety-net of a diaper or pull-up - it doesn’t seem to matter, because she can open her diaper herself now (**). We had some accidents, but her reaction was now one of u-oh, not of help!-I-can’t-do-this! I introduced the reward of an “M&M” (an organic chocolate covered raisin).

It has taken about four months now, and - when at home - she is fully potty-trained during the day. More than often she wakes up with a dry diaper too. She is even going on the potty at daycare (contrary to many other kids, the peer-pressure of her friends going on the potty there didn’t help much). And she hardly ever asks for her reward anymore!

“I’m a big girl now!” she will say with conviction.

Next challenge: going on the potty in public restrooms and public spaces like parks, and holding it in when we’re in the car!

(*) We like it a lot. It’s rather expensive ($35) , but it is comfortable (as far as I know), has storage bins on either side, one with a rod to put the toilet paper roll, and it can be closed to lok totally inconspicuous as a sturdy step stool that will lift your toddler up to the sink. And it looks neat too.

(**) Seventh Generation has made the tabs on their largest diapers bigger: very handy, and they no longer tear off.

I’m reading an interesting book called Talking with Children about loss, written by “Good Grief” counselor Maria Trozzi and co-authored by Kathy Massimini.

I’m always picking up books like those. I read Hope Edelman’s Motherless Daughters, for instance, when I was pregnant, and got many comments, mostly in the vein of “how can you read that now?”. But I am unashamed, because I’m a writer. It gives me the license to “imagine things” without having to be embarrassed about it. So, yes, I’ve imagined the worst for Amie: what if she died, what if I died, what if her father died? I’ve “lived” through these scenarios, and would like to, one day, write a novel about one of them and really explore such an event.

But I read these books first of all because, as any mother, I want to know what to do, or I want DH to know what to do, if Amie experiences a loss. I want to be prepared. Being a bookish person I naturally reach for texts, and find there my knowledge and my hope.

One of the first tasks of mourning, writes Trozzi, is understanding: understanding what death is. Not “going to sleep”, “passing away,” “going to heaven” or “being lost. Death is a physical process that ends everything that we call “human” that attaches to a person’s body. A child needs to understand that, and we need to stop using euphemisms. If a child doesn’t understand the most basic meaning of death, he or she will never be able to deal with loss, will never be able to mourn.

As I read that, I realized I had already started this task with Amie. For one, as I wrote earlier, I don’t want her to be ignorant of where her food comes from: that beef was a cow, that sausage was a pig, the wood in the hearth was a tree, etc.

But it has gone further. Many months ago Amie had repeated nightmares about a dinosaur. She woke up screaming and often would refuse to close her eyes again, because there was a dinosaur in the room, or it was coming. The way we helped her through this fearful time was by simply telling her that the dinosaurs are dead.

“What’s ‘dead’?”

“Dead means the dinosaur can’t move, can’t walk. Dead means he can’t talk, or listen, or look. Dead means his body is lying in the ground somewhere, buried, often even crushed to pieces. So he can’t get up and come here.”

She was quite resourceful. She said:

“But this dinosaur isn’t dead.”

“That’s not possible. All dinosaurs are dead. That’s why we call them a special word: ‘extinct’. ‘Extinct’ means that all the dinosaurs, without exception, are dead. So no dinosaur can come here.”

Sure, she was the only 2,5-year-old who knew the meaning of (and could pronounce) ‘extinct’. But hey, I believe in the power of words (and of their definitions, and of their correct application to the things in the world). And this was one clear-cut example of that power. Amie’s nightmares stopped.

- Amie, what’s the opposite of short?

- I don’t know! [she even pfsh-es, with an attitude already!]

- If you’re not short, what are you?

- Naked.

“I don’t know” (with the attitude) is now a favorite, as well as “why?”, “why?”, “why?”.

She is also afraid of wolves, now, suddenly. She doesn’t want to read Peter and the Wolf all by herself. But this morning she woke up giggling and when we asked what was up, she replied, shaking with glee:

“The wolf jumped out of the sea!”

Amie has taken a great liking to this game, another one straight from a Montessori lesson.

A while ago I introduced the tea set and the pitcher to let her pour water as a game, and her own drink at mealtime. More recently, I also gave her the responsibility of filling the sugar pot. She loved it so much, she was heartbroken yesterday morning when Laura had already filled it up. We could have poured the sugar back into the bag and let her do it over, but she is still coughing and sneezing all over the place.

Then I remembered a small bag of old brown rice that has been sitting in our pantry for over four years (five? six?). The rice is nicer than water or sugar, for her because it is such fun to dig her hand in, and for me because it doesn’t make such a mess when spilled.
I gave her a bowl full, a teaspoon and a smaller sugar spoon, and her tea set. She played for a full hour, carefully filling all her tea cups and pitchers, emptying them again, and so on. She couldn’t stop commenting:

- I like this game, Mama! I really do like this game very much.

Project for DH: Put together sorting trays, like these, or these:

Amie drew “The People” today. 4 of them. 1 big person and 3 tiny ones:

She also signed her name on the back:

We’ve been working on letters, and this is her first full written word (besides “8oo”, i.e., “Boo”). The A she has down pat. The M still tends to flatten out and go on at length. For the i and the e she needs a reminder in the form of a verbal description: “a line up with a dot on top”, “a line up and three short lines across”.

She has been very keyed up lately. Very repetitive, anxiously so sometimes, swallowing sounds and whole words in order to get it out as fast as possible: a song sung for the tenth time, a statement made the fifth time around. She talks and sings nonstop. She can’t fall asleep because her mind is racing. Her head hurts when you comb her hair. “Growth spurt,” we call it.

She has also been very imaginative, making up songs and stories, some cute (”Yesterday there was a dinosaur here and we played well together”) and some quite outrageous (”Mama pooped on the floor yesterday and I had to clean it up!” - so not true!).

Toddler life. Nonstop. Breathtaking.

Amie has been having nightmares about a dinosaur coming into the bedroom at night. It has spurred us to investigate whether she understands the difference between what is real and what is not, or “fake”. It is a good idea - we agree with several child developmental specialists - to make sure she does understand.

Baba was convinced she knows the difference already, but I wasn’t so sure. It’s not because she knows the words that she knows what they mean. So he asked her.

- Baba: Amie, is Monsters, Inc. real?

- Amie: Yes.

- Baba: Okay, yes, the movie is real. But is what happens in the movie real, or fake?

- Amie: Fake.

- Baba gestures triumphantly: See?

- Amie adds spontaneously: Boys are fake too.

Ha!

The next morning at breakfast we broached the subject again.

- Baba: Amie, am I real, or fake?

- Amie: You not real and you are not fake, you are just a boy.

We have a lot of work ahead of us and I so look forward to it!

Turns out Baba is just as much a softie as I am. When we went to bed after yesterday’s ordeal, I found Amie had finally fallen asleep in her own little bed. We lay there on our big bed for a minute or two, then I whispered: “I wish she were here with us…” He said, without hesitation: “You pick her up and I’ll get her pillow.” Soon we were all snuggled up together. Back to normal.

And today, this:

She calls it “Membery” or “Rememory”. It’s the first and so far only board game Amie has played!

Someone gave it to us. I am not fond of Dora - I don’t like the art (call me a snob), and while reading a story to another child I found careless gaps in the plot, while it was supposed to teach logic! So I hid it.

Unfortunately, Amie’ discovered an episode of Dora on the plane to Singapore, and during that ride she must have watched it 20 times (curiously, she didn’t want the headphones). Not since then: not on tv or in books - I’ve managed to keep Dora away.

Of course Amie found the game in my “squirelly cupboard”, where I keep books and games that are too old for her still. She wanted to know what it was.

I told her: it’s a memory game. With Dora.

“Let’s play it!” she called.

I was skeptical about whether she would be interested in anything more than the cards, and if so, whether she would get frustrated because it is too difficult for it. But it was worth a try.

I told her the rules of the game - so simple: “Find the match and you get to keep the cards!” Then I taught her to point to each card in a pair, naming them (”Dora, Dora! Monkey, monkey! Chicken, chicken!) and then to take one last hard look before they are turned around. I ask her: “Ready?” She looks with burning concentration, then says: “Yes!”

First we played with 6 cards - 3 pairs in 2 rows. Way too easy! Soon I added a pair: 8 cards - 4 pairs in 2 rows… Well, you know the rules are that the youngest begins each game and that she loses her turn only if she makes a mistake. Let’s just say that in the end, she had nearly all the cards (of which there are 72) in her box.

Then she got careless - we had been playing nonstop for over 30 minutes - and didn’t get the match. She gladly let me take my turn, but when I found the match and wanted another turn, oh no!

Funny how they dazzle you with their intellectual skills, their fabulous memory, intense concentration and grownup language at the age of two… but they fall apart when such little things don’t go their way. It truly reveals how there are so many sides to a child’s development, not just if she knows her letters or can draw between the lines. As for the matters of the will, or emotional development, or character: aren’t they matters of experience, of maturity?

Amie has been around for a little over two years, how could I expect her to be mature about it? I gave her a big hug, let her take over again, and we decided that, for the time being, Amie has all the turns in Memory.

I’m sitting in the living room, it’s 9:30 pm. And I am listening to Amie screaming that she wants Mama to lie next to her and that she wants to go see Mama.

DH has been ill for a week so he has been sleeping in the guest room/study and has also not been putting Amie to bed at night - I usually do the nap. This evening is the first time he is putting her back to bed and she is hysterical.

The first time she climbed out of the bed I heard him say: “Mama will be angry with you.” This seemed to stall her - the thought of angering me?! - and she stood in the corridor, at the bedroom door, screaming pathetically, not knowing what to do.

I went to her, gave her a hug and explained calmly that it was Baba’s turn to take her to bed and I was right nearby. I carried her to the bed and she resumed her crying. Baba was a bit upset that I hadn’t been angry like he had said.

I felt I shouldn’t be angry with her. I wanted to be supportive (”I know you can do it”) and sympathetic (”I know how you feel”), but also decisive (”I am not coming to bed, you have to go to sleep with Baba”).

I feel Amie and I have become very close this last week, perhaps due to Baba’s semi-absence, perhaps due to her having a high-fever flu over the weekend and spending a lot of time close to me. She comes to give me hugs and kisses more often, more intensely too - harder squeezes, bone-crushing snuggles, softer kisses, the expression on her face always almost one of pain and worry. I hadn’t thought she would also have separation anxiety. Her babysitter came this morning and she let me go off to work without a thought…

Now she is coming out again and I am resolved to sit here in the sofa and not give her a hug. Can I smile

…

I didn’t give her a hug, kept a neutral face, and told her to go back and no, not climb onto the sofa next to me. Baba was right behind her and for a moment we were at an impasse. Amie sobbing in the middle of the living room, me on the sofa trying to keep my cool, Baba in the corridor looking in not knowing what to do.

I could tell he didn’t think I was being firm enough. I told him to pick her up and hug her - as I was evidently prohibited from doing - and to carry her up and down the corridor a couple of times.This seemed to work: she calmed down, probably because she could see me each time they passed by the living room. But then she began to insist she sleep next to me on the sofa - which she did when she was sick - and we were back at square one.

Baba carried her back to the bedroom and closed the bedroom door. She is now screaming even more hysterically and I heard her pulling on the doorknob but Baba must have brought her back to the bed.

Now it’s 10:10 and she is still crying, but calmer, or more exhausted. It reminds me of along period months ago, when she was having such separation anxiety it was almost debilitating to herself and all around her. She screamed when she was dropped off at daycare, when Baba tried to put her to sleep, even when I left the room, and we couldn’t get a babysitter…. She screamed so badly at nap in daycare that we changed her to a mornings-only schedule, which helped tremendously (sleep seems to be a factor here). We stopped the Baba every-other-day bedtime to an only-Baba-bedtime, and after a couple of bad evenings (never as bad as this), it became her routine. We went to Singapore and India where she was kind and open to so many people… When she came back to daycare they called her “a different Amie!”

She needs to be up early to go to daycare. The practical part of me says to just go in and take over and, exhausted as she is, she will be asleep in 5 minutes. The wife part of me feels for Baba - though it is also somewhat upset at his berating me for being too soft - and wants to respect Baba’s belief that if I do that, it will give her the message that screaming will get her what she wants. That’s a belief I subscribe to… but in this situation? The Mama part of me says: just go, go! Then: no, wait! If you go you might precipitate another bout of separation anxiety…

Now she is quiet. Is she asleep?

How to love and nurture your child and also make sure that her love is not so exclusively of you? I want her to love others, for their sake, of course, but for hers first of all. Because what if something happened to me? What if one day I’m not there for her, and the only way she could stop crying is from exhaustion? I think of that possibility every day. I know it happens. But why do I feel that I have to be prepared for that - that I have to prepare her for that?

Why is it is so damn painful! How can something so soft be so damn hard!

It’s 10:20 now and still quiet. Can I go in yet and hug her?

Have you seen Amie puzzling (video to the right)? She was only 18 months old and really into it: fit-the-shape peg puzzles as well as jigsaw puzzles. After a while she lost interest and moved on. I wasn’t heart-broken, because I knew that by then she had memorized all the puzzles and wasn’t, therefore, really puzzling anymore. I described all this in First Puzzles for a Child Under Two Years.

Today she asked to make puzzles again. I had to dig them out from behind hundreds of children’s books (I am not kidding). Two hours later, this was the result:

As before, I mixed up the 16 same-shape-and-size but different-pattern pieces that fit into two boards (described in A Child’s First Puzzles), and the 16 geometrical shapes that also go into two different boards. She wasn’t even challenged.

• Touch still first, visuals second

Then I also mixed up the pieces of the eight 4-piece jigsaw puzzles (the penguins, etc. that she puts together in the old video). This was a way of forcing her to look at the images first, before resorting to the shapes and the fit of the pieces. She had no trouble with selecting the right pieces, but when she turned to the puzzling, it was clear that she is still predominantly guided by touch.

Even so, though she was still and often trying to fit a corner piece (which seems to be a visual, not a tactile clue) into the middle of a puzzle, or trying to attach the zebra’s head to his tail, it was much easier to talk her through it. I merely had to point out to her that it was a corner she was holding, and that she might use it to fix the zebra’s head, or that it might fit in the upper left corner, if she turned it a bit, and she was on it.

• “Fix it” with visual and directional pointers

Most of my help was purely verbal. “Why don’t you fix the zebra’s head” and “fix the giraffe’s neck?” were sufficient pointers. I found that the combination of the word “fix” and a brief description of the two parts she is supposed to join together seems to be the best way of directing her to pay attention to the image. 

Alos invaluable were the directional clues: “to the left, right, above and below” this or that piece. “Turn it a little”.

Thus we moved up to the little suitcase, the Crocodile Creek collection of four puzzles: one 4 pieces, one 6, one 8 and one 12 pieces. They’re tough: they certainly not designed with young toddlers in mind. Most pieces have a jumble of zebra stripes or simply a flat expanse of background that even I had to study closely to figure out where they went! But I talked her through even the biggest puzzle simply by giving her visual clues about the image and directional clues about where it should go relative to the other pieces.

• 24 pieces!

In the end we did two 24-piece puzzles of “Nijntje” (in the picture they are right behind her right hand). Even those she completed without my even touching a single piece. And in the end she was getting the hang of it.

“Let’s fix the rabbit’s head,” she mumbled. When I pointed out that she might turn it around, she said: “Don’t worry, Mama, I’ll do it. I’ll try. I’ll do my best.”

I trust you, dear. Don’t worry.

(Check out more pictures of our puzzling adventure today in my Flickr badge)