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…”

It’s not a tea party. It’s Rabbit Stew.

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:

Over the weekend Amie was presented with a wonderful gift from friends: their daughter’s old doll house. A real, wooden, doesn’t-fall-over-when-you-bump-it doll house! Complete with people and pets and furniture and even a garden for planting.

Amie and eight-year-old S who gave it to her (I plan to return it once Amie too has grown out of it) were setting it up together. Amie of course had a different idea of where things should go. For instance, there are six dolls, but only two beds, so why shouldn’t one sleep in the bath tub? (The old homemade doll house will be the guest quarters). Soon they found a balance and played together for hours.

But after S had gone, Amie changed one thing so that it fits the universe as she knows it:

DH is a Montessori preschool alumnus and I have always liked the Montessori approach, not knowing very much about it. When it was time to sign Amie up for a preschool, I started reading up on it, because we wanted her to go a Montessori preschool

(She didn’t get in because of a stupid breakdown of communication. We visited the school in October and the director told us we could let her know as late as January, even February. Wen we called in December, she was already putting people on a waiting list! Bummer! No worries, we found a cozy little preschool just around the corner instead.)

In any case, long story short and all that, I love the approach and plan to implement a lot of it at home. Today we made a real breakthrough.

One of the tenets of Montessori is to let the child do as much for herself as possible, and she and her commentators suggest a wealth of activities that children might do themselves and feel good about.One of these is letting the child pour her own milk at breakfast and water and juice throughout the day.

I didn’t even finish the sentence suggesting this, but jumped up and asked Amie if she wanted some green juice (her only source of veggies, people!). We proceeded to the kitchen table where I gave her her glass and then poured some juice into a small pitcher. I could see she was intrigued. Then I asked: “Will you pour it yourself? Would you like that?”

Well!

She was surprised when I asked, fascinated when I showed her, very careful when she did it herself, and very proud when she succeeded.

Then I poured some water into her little (tiny!) porcelain teapot and showed her how to play Tea. Caution turned into confidence, concentration into glee. She got the hang of it so fast. Look how she used both hands, to hold the cup, and to steady the teapot.

What a treat for all of us!

I’m currently reading Lynne Lawrence’s Montessori Read and Write and Elisabeth Hainstock’s Teaching Montessori at Home: The Preschool Years

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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!

In the meantime the Manush House is finished. I decided not to glue the bathroom/kitchen and the staircase onto a cardboard sheet. It would make it more difficult to move the doll house around and take it places (if ever Amie wants to do that).

Here’s the whole house (so far), with some of the proud owners taking advantage of the new facilities (note the Mama in the bathtub, the Baba in the kitchen!) and their guests, Mickey and Minnie, asleep in the living room/bedroom.

Reader Anja had suggested I send a little story about the doll house to Mothering Magazine. I was considering it when two days later said magazine arrived in my mailbox and there already was a story about making a fairy house out of trash. What a coincidence! It’s great to know more people are doing this!

In the meantime I had also sent word to Annie’s HomeGrown - the staircase is made out of three of their boxes. They loved it and guess what: they will feature the house in their next newsletter! Everyone sign up!

(*) I am happy to have made this doll house almost entirely out of trash: boxes of all sizes, aluminum foil, plastic containers and styrofoam, as well as some pictures out of magazines all bound for the recycling bin. Only the paint, glue, staples, tape and ink were new.

You can review the progress on the doll house (in chronological order) here, here, here and here and lastly here.

More pictures:
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That’s it for this installment of the Manush House. Amie is already lobbying for another addition: a bedroom. I am thinking: a piano! The living room needs a grand piano. I’m on the lookout for a good box.

Some scissor work on the IKEA catalog and the Manush kitchen and bathroom are fully equipped and ready for their new occupants. But where are they? Oh, they’re at the zoo.

Yes, there are even curtains!

What remains is fixing the whole thing - kitchen/bath unit and staircase - together onto a large cardboard sheet that will give it some stability (right now the box falls over too easily). Once it’s totally done I’ll try to take some better pictures.

Happy New York*, Everyone!

Amie went to bed a bit later after a sumptuous feast of Indian take-out. DH and I watched a crummy movie over a crummy internet connection - it felt like our old graduate student days! Only Amie woke up twice with nightmares.

Today it is snowing again, of the kind in between sleet and snow, so no walk outside as planned. But there are plenty of indoors activities, like setting up a zoo complete with a train and holding pens and zookeepers (the Manushes: they’re jacks-of-all-trades).

(*) Last year Amie mixed up “Happy New Year” with “Happy New York” because we happened to be in New York at the time. So that’s how we greet the new year now.

We’re not really into big festivities round here - it comes with being far away from family, and Amie isn’t into presents and all that (yet). We spent some lovely days with friends in NYC. They’re into big get-togethers with hour-long conversations, heaps of good food and frequent bursts of laughter any time. You find yourself in the middle of that wonderful city but you just can’t make yourself get up and go places!

Perceiving a definite slow-down on other blogs, I decided to take a little time off too. The free moments here and there I devoted to the “bari” or “badi” - as Anja called it, in Bengali: the little house I was making for Amie, I mean the Manushes.

I spent more time on it than I planned to, for several reasons: the paint was such that it needed several coats, I changed the colors and design midway through, I got very, very into it and, much to my surprise, Amie let me work on it once in a while. It was very relaxing, in the evening after she had gone to sleep, to spend 15 minutes with it. I’ve never been a knitter, but I guess this comes close.

Baba Manush proudly surveys his domain from his new steps.

I used two Annie’s Homegrown boxes: Cheddar Bunnies and Mac’nCheese. Seeing how heavy-footed those Manushes are, I made the staircase very strong, with reinforcements and lots o lots of cellotape!

Then I decided to change the color scheme

It needs a little more work, some finishing touches. Hope to report back on that soon!