MamaStories

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!

Ok, I think we finally found the ultimate building blocks!

(Baba and Amie play with the Kapla blocks) 

Looking for a birthday present to give a thee-year-old, we stumbled upon these Kapla Blocks.  My first reaction was: huh, so what? They are simply wooden blocks or rather miniature planks. But then you take them out of the box and set them down, and you know: this will last forever.

There are no screws, bolts, glue, anything, yet you can make amazing constructions with them. And they are so very well crafted: set them on any side and they will stand, firmly. In other words, it’s not like you will be building a house of cards or playing a game of Jenga. Hooray for absolutely straight corners!

They are also entirely made of beautiful natural wood grown in 100% sustainable forests in France.

We got an extra 100-piece box for Amie and she loves it. So far she has made bridges, bridges, like in the picture. And she has knocked down houses not of her own construction. That’s an issue worth a post of itself, but suffice it to say it goes like this: “Amie don’t be naughty!” “I’m not naughty, I pretending to be naughty!”

After the disappointment with the Wedgits (*) - they promise no phtalates but what’s with the smell? - I was on the look out for something naturally woody and not too pricey. I think this might be it.

(*) I’m not throwing them out as yet: they might become more appealing to Amie when she gets a little older, but so far she is not keen on them.

“Amie, don’t throw those blocks.”

“I’m not thro-o-owing, Mama. I’m practicing throwing.”

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)

The day after Anja commented on the dollhouse in the background of a recent picture, Amie took a sudden interest in it. It had been sitting on that ottoman for months…

The first thing she asked for was steps. The Manushes couldn’t get into the house! So I made steps, which the Manushes now use very carefully and meticulously, almost like a toddler unsure of her step(s)…

Here they are, with Bob the Builder, soundly asleep in their beds made of blocks.

Then Amie asked for another house. “I want one more house,” she said. I proposed that we build two more rooms - I knew of just the right box! I asked her which those rooms should be. Well, Amie reasoned, they already have a living room and a bedroom (both rolled into the above), so they need a kitchen! What the second room should be she couldn’t think, but she agreed when I proposed a bathroom. She also pointed out the kitchen should be on the groundfloor, the bathroom on the second floor.

Construction has started. Please don your hard hats!

Phase I: structure and plumbing

The bathroom: bathtub and toilet

The idea is to make the whole house purely from recycled materials, preferably from things that were on their way to the trash.

Just getting Phase I completed was nervewrecking, because Amie wanted to help and got very interested in my scissors (that’s why I didn’t take out my Exacto knife, you know) and the stapler. A good opportunity for a safety talk!

We’ll keep you updated as the works progress!

(Concentration)

Amie has taken a fancy to the glue. She has “glued” before: we put glue all over a sheet of paper and she stuck bits of paper and other things to it. But this time she wanted to glue.

This meant first tearing up a page out of a magazine. We were both of us, I think, rather surprised that it was the first time she had torn anything (on purpose), and that tearing paper doesn’t come naturally (but then, what does?).

So we had fun getting the hang of tearing first, and then Amie set to gluing. In the end I was the only one sticking the pieces onto the tree (in case you are marvelling over the even distribution of pieces). But Amie would have gone on putting the glue on for hours if I hadn’t pointed out our art work was finished.

So we’re crafting now, she and I together! It’s so much fun and I am beginning to (re)acquaint myself with the many craft-with-kids blogs out there.

(The result)

Amie had a blast as a spider yelling “trick or treat” and “boo!”. She insisted that the day was called “Halloween Party”, not plain “Halloween”.

I managed to keep her exposure to candy to a minimum, and she still thinks it means just chocolate. Someone offered her a lollipop and she looked at it with amazement - she had never seen one before, and probably even its unnatural neon-ish color came as a shock. I succeeded in wisking it away as “never mind, something for older kids”.

For those of you who want to learn more about Halloween, over a year ago I wrote a whole series of articles on Suite101.com about its origins, its place amongst the Fall Festivals of Death, the European take on Halloween and European alternatives. It was a fun topic to research.

One more follow-up on Simon Says… 

We’re at Peet’s coffee shop and Amie is on my hip while I try to order and pay. She keeps pulling on the tip jar, which is (a) full of cash and (b) made of glass and (c) very close to the edge of the counter.

I tell her three (3) times to stop it. The fourth time I get desperate and say:

- “Simon says: don’t touch the jar!”

And she stops!

She’ll listen to Simon, but not to me.

Please tell me this is a phase…

 A little update to my Simon Says Peter Says entry.

When Amie wants to play the game now, she says: “I want to do Peter Says”. Then she does what Peter says, yells “No!” and undoes it.

“I want to do Peter Says” is a strange way of asking for the game, isn’t it, because she knows it is really called “Simon Says,” and that is how she used to ask for it.

We figured it out quickly. What she really means is: “I want to do what Peter says.” That’s the game: doing what Peter says - the forbidden! - laughing real hard when we react accordingly shocked, and undoing it.

Sigh. Her love for Peter was stronger than we thought. Already she is choosing the boys who we say are bad for her. Already she is laughing at our protests!