MamaStories

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

A lifetime time ago, when we were still kidless, we used to get together with friends and spend the evening eating a home-cooked meal, drinking homemade wine, chatting and, eventually, playing Carcassonne. I know, you thought I was going to write “passing out” or some such, but nope, we just played this nerdy board game.

What with a toddler around… forget it! The tiles would go all over the place, get lost, and what’s worse, Mama would lose because she would constantly get distracted.

Or so we thought. Then David, the owner of Eureka, a puzzle and games shop here in Brookline, suggested we play the game with Amie. Just treat it like a puzzle: let her match the tiles up! It’s very simple: match grass to grass, road to road, castle to castle.

Amie took to it right away. We take turns, and to make it more interesting draw tiles from one another, then put them down on the “board”. We play for about half an hour, and she has become quite good at filling up tricky gaps in the landscape.

I’m sure there are many more games around that can be adapted like that for much younger kids. Yes! You can relive the fun and games of your old life, or at least  somewhat modified versions of them….

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:

We had a wonderful Sunday filled with family fun. A visit to the Science Museum (DH and I have lived in Boston for almost 10 and this was our first visit!), shopping together (wonderful to see Amie interact with strangers in the store), building and flying paper airplanes (from this wonderful book), reading books and playing with animals.

At the end of the long and tiring day, Amie sat down on the floor and spontaneously took some quiet time. She opened her arts and crafts box and cut pieces of paper (with her ziggy-zaggy safety scissors), colored them, and glued them to a page.

I had nothing to do with it! It was one of those rare and harmonious moments when everyone was doing something exclusively by him/herself.

Part of our shopping today involved a certain do-it-yourself-hardware store, where I found a couple of simple binding posts with screws, like so (couldn’t even find a picture of it on Google Images!):

… So that I could finally assemble our “Bambi,” which we cut out of recycled cardboard and painted a while back.

It’s a pull toy! It just took me a while to get sturdy enough fasteners, and these binding posts are very cheap, strong and reusable!

I think we’ll make more of these, if Amie likes it - she certainly did look forward to this one. I’ll have to get the hang of coordinating and weighting the limbs and whatnot needs to get moved by one pull, because this baby Bambi moves even clumsier than the newborn one in the movie!

More about having actually watched Bambi later…

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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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.

We were on the phone with my parents-in-law and I or DH made a passing reference to watching movies on a big screen tv when at our friends’ place in New York. Amie had been eating her O’s peacefully (more or less), but when she heard that, she piped up:

“We’re gonna need a big screen tv at some point.”

Me: “Where did you get that idea?!”

Baba: “Good girl.”

Really.

The place with the big screen tv also had a three-and-a-half-year-old who received a set of beads for Christmas. Amie with her attention and occasional reverence for what the bigger kids do, was immediately into it.

I got her the same set today and she has the patience for stringing about 15 beads. I am so amazed at her little fingers working like busy bees, the intense concentration on her face!

There is something about this picture… I feel I get a glimpse here of what she might look like in a few years time, maybe even in a decade or two…

Anyway, Amie doesn’t however get the point. All the beads need to be taken off the string and be returned to the box at the end. It’s a relief actually: that one box will last a long time!

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.