The Girl and Toys

Recently, I read Tom Hodgkinson’s The Idle Parent.  One of the many points he makes in that book is that children actually don’t need very many toys, if any. When allowed, they show a natural ingenuity to make fun out of everyday objects and with everyday activities, which I’ve certainly experienced with the Girl.

I mostly hate plasticky toys anyway. They are made cheaply and break easily.  And in the manufacturing process, they don’t take into account that their crappy little cost-effective toy will one day be given a name by a little Girl, who will test the limits of that toy proportionate to how much she loves it.

FACT: while writing this, I was asked to help fix a toy that the Girl had broken; a rubber lizard called Lissie. The Girl had stretched Lissie’s arms until one of them broke off. Do you know how hard it is to re-attach a tiny, rubber arm with sticky-back plastic and glue? It ain’t easy, folks. Especially with a Girl who’s teary, begging you to help her Lissie.

But, The Girl doesn’t really need plasticky objects which are cheaply made, and often slickly sold. She can pour her love into anything. That is the wondrous ability of childhood, which is so easily lost in adulthood.

Recently, as many of you may know, I’ve celebrated a birthday, with birthdays being a favourite activity/event for the Girl. We went to my mum’s house, and she helped her Nana make the cake; mixing the ingredients, and (of course) licking the beaters. When it came time to frost the cake, and to apply the necessary sprinkles, The Girl was right in there.

And getting back to the whole toys thing, her contribution to present time was taking the blue and purple tissue paper sheets inside my gift-bag, tearing them into strips, and encouraging all of us to make something fun out of them as we sat, post-dinner. She suggested a tie for me, a bracelet for someone else. And for herself, she became adorned with a makeshift hair-ribbon.

Ribbons are universally loved.

This is not to say that The Girl has no toys, or that I am not prepared to buy them. In fact, I was thinking of doing a mini-series on some of her stuffie managarie, for posterity.

But, it’s really just a matter of perspective. Toys are not things to own just to own them. They should be tools to activate the imagination. Because, it’s the imagination which is the thing to invest in, so that she can carry that power with her into adulthood, along with the idea that objects should serve to continue to develop that imagination, which is something worth investing in no matter how old one is.

Lissie isn’t a rubber lizard. She’s transformed into a sparkling personality by the Girl’s imagination. The tissue paper ribbon isn’t really tissue paper. It’s transformed into the finest silk by the Girl’s creative brain.

It’s only the manufacturing process that lets her down.

The Girl and the Wiggly Tooth

Baby teeth; they’re packing up and moving out, one by one.

What makes it weird for me is, first, that I remember like it was yesterday what the appearance of her first tooth felt like. And second, I wasn’t expecting her baby teeth to start giving notice until she was at least six or seven. That’s when I lost all of my teeth.

But, upon a visit to the dentist this past week, it was discovered that the Girl has a wiggly tooth. Actually, two. But one is really wiggly.

The Girl is proud of her wiggly tooth.  I think she knows it means that she’s growing up, and that things are changing, for the better.

She’s growing up! Imagine what will happen to me when she begins to develop breasts!

Steady on, old man. One thing at a time …

[Post-script: the tooth is now out. But, we don't know where it is ...]

The Girl and Parent Night

Today, I attended what was called a student-led Parent night. This means that The Girl’s teacher, Mrs. Townsend, and the Girl herself, sat down and decided on what would be discussed/shown on the night itself. So, she’s in charge with her teacher overlooking the proceedings.

This is a big deal for me, given that every time I ask the Girl what she did at Kindergarten on any given day, the answer is invariably: “I don’t remember”.

I don’t hold this against her. What she did in kindergarten that day is so a-couple-of hours-ago. She is, as I’ve mentioned, a Creature of The Eternal Present.

So, the format of Parent night (actually, more like Parent Afternoon) was perfect in this respect. It put us in her world, scholastically speaking. She showed us the storybook she’s currently reading, the scientific experiments she’s working on (magnets!), math games using cards (the More or Less game!), her artwork, her favourite toys when she’s got all of her work done (farm animals, and dinosaurs!).

And of course, the big payoff is how proud she is of her own work, and showing it to us as it’s happening, sitting together around a low table in very tiny chairs that still have the same design as they did when I was in kindergarten. To me, that’s a vital, vital thing when it comes to school. Bored kids, kids that get into trouble, are those who have no sense of ownership or pride in what it is that they’re doing. Sometimes, it’s something to do with them. Sometimes, it’s what they’re given.

But, the point is that I hope the Girl always feels that her work is connected to her in some way, that she can be proud of it without it being just a burden of someone else’s expectations on her, even mine. That’s the difference between the love of learning and hating school, it seems to me.

And when it comes to this idea of loving learning and being proud of her work, this isn’t about me thinking about how school is going to prepare her for her future in the world of commerce. No. I mean that I hope she continues to be proud of her work for the rest of kindergarten.

Why wait for the future when you’re a Creature of the Eternal Present?

The Girl and My 42nd Birthday

Today’s my birthday, and yesterday I saw the Girl at her mother’s house.

She lives for birthdays, for celebrations. She gave me a purple dress shirt with some matching ties, which she picked out herself with her mother’s help. Also, she helped to decorate tiny cupcakes with “Happy Birthday” written on them which her mother baked. Her friend Christopher helped decorate too, choosing the colours for the icing, rolling each one in sprinkles.

The payoff all around to yesterday’s visit?

“Happy birthday, Daddy. And happy Valentine’s Day.”  And the kiss on my forehead, almost a parental act on her part, like our roles were reversed for that instant.  I felt loved, and taken care of.

There are scores and scores of books out there about parenthood and about childhood, too.

But, I think the reason it’s such a fascinating subject is that a large portion of it is ineffable. It is more complex than we think it is. It is more magical. It is full of surprises.

It’s a mystery of love.

The Girl, The Coffee Shop, and the Future

Let me see if I can translate an experience I once had while enjoying an early summer evening with the Girl at a local coffee shop a couple of years ago.

When the Girl was three, I used to take long walks with her around the neighbourhood where we used to live, with her in her big heavy-duty plastic wagon and me doing the pulling. The soundtrack to this was the trundle-trundle-trundle of the wheels, the birds singing, sometimes the patter of rain falling, with the precious weight of the Girl shifting around in the wagon.

The neighbourhood was, probably still is,  a typical suburban sprawl, mostly meant to be traversed by car, not on foot. So, it was often a lonely journey; lonely in the sense of not seeing many others doing the same thing as we were.  But, within walking distance was a nice little park. A little further beyond was a collection of shops in a strip mall (ah, suburbia with your beloved strip malls …) on one corner of which was a chain coffee shop that rhymes with Pesquires.

I talked a bit about the importance of ritual a while back. These sojourns to the coffee shop during this particular era became one of those. I’d order a coffee, and a hot chocolate, and a slice of banana bread. And the Girl and I would share a table. Sometimes we’d chat. Sometimes I’d read her a story from the selection of storybooks they had there. One good thing about suburbia here in the Lower Mainland of BC; they get the importance of being kid-friendly (are you listening, Downtown Vancouver?) even in coffee shops.

For instance, they also sold stuffies there.

I never bought one. But, another part of the ritual was the three-year old Girl browsing the stuffies on the shelves while I ordered our drinks.  One day, in that space between ordering the drinks, waiting for them, and casting a look at the Girl by the shelves, something happened.

The early evening sun was still filtering in through the large windows at one end of the coffee shop, outlining bright rectangles of warmth across the wood floors. The Girl was lost in her stuffy-browsing reverie. And as I looked at her, I realized that I was in a moment. Suddenly, I was aware of how important that moment was to note, that this moment, this day, this era, wouldn’t endure. I was aware that I needed to store up this treasure, as a memory to hold in my mind forever.

And almost as soon as I’d realized that I was in a moment, the present started up and I was myself again.

I think we adults put too much emphasis on the future. We talk about ‘children being the future’, that we have to ensure ‘the future of our children’.  I think this is something of a mistake, or at least not the whole picture. Children live in the eternal present. They take what they need from the moment, and perhaps apply it to the things they look forward to. But, even in that, the feeling of being in the now and enjoying the thrill of what is to come is all about a state of things which we perhaps lose when we culturally fixate on the future. In this sense, our children are not our future; they are our present. We shouldn’t work to ensure their future. We should to so to develop their present.

My vision of any future version of the Girl was and is my own, therefore. And yet my goals for realizing that bright future are all about how I conduct myself in that eternal present. It’s about teaching her, showing her, intelligence, good humour, confidence, compassion, flexibility, appreciation of beauty, and many other things right now, today, in my own actions.

Yet, my recognition of that moment in time, the appreciation of it, was about the present too. It was about a little slice of existence to be remembered, stored up as treasure. For, she will never be the same Girl again outside of that little jewel of memory, that treasure in amber of the little girl I loved so well as she was in that particular moment.

The Girl and Snakes

On the Princess to Tomboy scale, The Girl tends to stray closer to the Princess end.

But, there are important elements that help to center her. One of those things is snakes.

Not actual snakes. Well, not yet.

But, we were at the book store on the weekend. I was looking for a few classics to read to her (The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass, and Peter Pan – I found all but the latter).

And while I was looking, she picked out a book about snakes, an actual field guide and not a kid’s book, that she insisted she wanted. Actually, it’s the Collins Gem edition of Snakes, produced in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institute by Chris Mattison.

So, we bought it.

At story time, we read the first chapter of The Wizard of Oz. But, then we dove right into the snake book, with the harmless snakes to be found at the beginning of the book. At the back of the book, we found the lethally-armed-with-syringes-loaded-with-appalling-venom-for-teeth-type snakes.

She loves them all.  The Girl’s favourite snake? A mole snake, hit by a car, and squashed on the road in South Africa. And after we read all about the snakes, she went right to sleep, peacefully, and with an angelic look on her face. No fears, no nightmares, no problem.

The Girl asked me about why some snakes are dangerous, and I told her about poison, and about constricting, and the like. I told her about what many snakes eat; birds, small mammals, bugs. She’s beginning to get the whole food chain thing. But, in a cartoon world of anthropomorphized birds, mice, and bugs, it’s a bit of a leap from My Friend Rabbit and into the amoral world of the real-live animal kingdom.

Snakes, serpants, wyrms, basilisks, dragons; they get bad raps in our culture, and in others, too. Sure, some snakes are dangerous animals, and our instincts to revile them is perhaps a function of our survival as a species. And between the Bible and Sigmund Freud, I doubt whether we’ll ever be reconciled to our belly-crawling, dust-eating, scaly pals.

Snakes are, in their way, beautiful creatures, albeit far and away from My Little Pony, and other prescribed ideas of what a little girl in our culture should find beautiful. The contrast between the intricate patterns and textures of snakes that makes each species unique gives the Girl a different take on what the beauty of the natural world can offer her.

And, the fear of snakes against that beauty provides a certain thrill.

I think a little fear of this kind is good, especially when it’s decided upon by the Girl herself.  I think fear of this kind provides something of an emotional contrast to the feel-good stories about animals getting along together. And she gets to decide whether reading a snake book is scary, or fascinating, or both.

Updates on this blog twice a week

Hey readers!

I’ve had a lot of fun starting up this blog, and updating it daily over the past week. I’m going to start scheduling posts twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays, PST. So, stay tuned, and thanks.

You can subscribe to this post via RSS, to get most recent posts on your Google page, or what-have-you. Or, you can subscribe by email, and get the posts sent to you directly into your inbox if that makes more sense to you.

You can enable both the RSS subscription or the email subscription in the right-hand column of this blog. Right there: ———->

And once again, thanks for reading. I look forward to your comments, suggestions, stories as this blog (and the Girl herself) grows.

Cheers!

Rob

Resident Dad, and Editor-in-Chief.

The Girl, the Cats, Personal Space, and Unconditional Love

Animals and children seem to have an understanding, a large portion of which has to do with unconditional love.

The Girl has two cats: extroverted Daisy (orange, white, with streaks of black), and the more introverted and downright reclusive Teacup (all black, but for a single toe and a single patch on her breast, both of which are as white as the driven snow) . She got them last year, when she immediately began to think of them as sort of mobile stuffies. That attitude has changed since she began to take responsibility for their upkeep - well,  slightly.

One thing having cats in the house has taught her is about respecting another being’s space. She sometimes learns this the hard way, as cats are particularly apt to decide when your space is actually theirs, for instance. The Girl has been scratched a few times. Sometimes this is because of this catitiude with regard to space. At other times, it’s about the Girl’s tendency to continue to treat her cats as toys, left over from her earlier and younger days.

Daisy. And now the Internet has yet another cat image.

For whatever reason, when I see her interact with the cats – constantly picking them up, sometimes getting in their faces – I’m torn between the idea of wanting her to learn about how to respect someone’s right to be left alone sometimes even if they are a cat, and with the idea that the reason the Girl is overzealous at times is that the kind of love a 5-year old girl has for an animal isn’t something that I myself can approach or fully understand.  It has a depth of its own.

Sometimes, I get the balance completely wrong.

The day I noticed a cat-scratch on her cheek, I decided to sit the Girl down and have a chat about this idea of space, and the respect of boundaries between her, and her cats.  I asked her why she thought Daisy had scratched her, and she couldn’t tell me. I suggested that it might be because there are times when Daisy doesn’t want to play, and that Daisy’s space should be respected at those times.

The Girl’s face crumpled.

“But … I love her.”

Cue my heart breaking in two.

Of course. If the Girl sustained scratches from her cat, is was not out of malice, and that she deserved it. It was out of sheer, unadulterated, and unguarded affection on her part that perhaps her cat wasn’t in tune with – or was in tune with, and was returned in a playful manner that resulted in the scratch. It doesn’t stop the Girl from embracing, picking up, petting, and speaking in affectionate tones to her cats.

The point is, The Girl still resides in that particular Garden of Eden, where the loving is more important than the (very mild in this case) injury. It’s me who’s calling to her from the Biblical Land of Nod, a place for all kinds of adult baggage that is of no use to her.

Oh sure; I’m exactly right about this issue of space. Everyone needs space away on one’s own, untouched by others, even if they don’t know they need it. The Girl does need to learn this truth. It’s important.

But apart from my relationship with my daughter, it’s been a long time since I’ve thought of giving someone that level of intense affection without thinking of the claws. The two go together. That part doesn’t change, whether you’re my age or the Girl’s age.  But, like Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, the emphasis one places on one thing or another depends on which point of view one chooses to take. It all depends on what is held to the greater value. And ultimately, that comes down to choice.

Looking back, I’ve sustained scratches from those I’ve loved and trusted, not to mention doling out a number of scratches my own. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone lashes out unfairly at those they love. I’ve experienced both.

But despite all that, I’m not regretful of having risked loving them, just as I hoped they don’t regret ever having loved me. Had I confused a need for space by taking it and building a fortress with it, my life would have been the poorer even if it was more safe.

And perhaps, I’d be one Girl short, too; a sobering thought.

Anyway, enough about me.

The real point here is that I hope The Girl continues to value the bounties of love over its sometimes painful costs. I hope that she continues to embrace the warm furriness of love, and accept the scratch of bitter acrimony in her stride.

I want her to continue to choose love, while making allowances for fear and pain. For the latter comes along whether we want it to or not.

The other, we have to chase.

The Girl and I ‘Step Inside Love’

Ritual is vital to life, I think. And songs even more so.

Most of my favourite parenting experiences have been centered around rituals, most specifically around the details that give them their shape.  One big area of ritual between the Girl and I has been bathtime. There are many details in there, some of which I’ll talk about in ensuing posts. But, I’d like to talk about part of the ritual that happens just after teeth-brushing; the putting on of the pajamas.

courtesy of by amanky

While helping her dress, I’d sing a certain song to her. I don’t remember when this started, but I’m guessing it was when the Girl was about two and a half; an incredible two-and-a-half years ago.

Being a big, freakishly big Beatles fan, I’ve been singing Beatles songs, and solo Beatles tunes, to her since she was an infant; “Good Night” from the White Album, “Yellow Submarine” (which she sings on her own), and McCartney’s “Junk” from his first solo album have been stalwart fab-four songs of her childhood so far.  But, during the period when The Girl stepped into her pull-up, and then her pajama bottoms, I began to sing the McCartney-penned “Step Inside Love”, which appears in it’s Beatle form on the Anthology III double-set; sort of a Brazilian-flavoured little tune of invitation.

The tune was originally written for a TV show in the ’60s, and so on the Beatles Anthology version its in an embryonic, unfinished stage. But, that’s the first version I’d ever heard. I suppose encouraging my daughter to step into her pull-up, then into her pajama bottom using this tune was kind of a literal employment of the song. But, it began to take on important meaning between us as we repeated the ritual more and more.

Step Inside Love/And Stay/Step Inside Love (x3)/I want you to stay …

And eventually of course, she began to sing along, so it’s become more than just a pun to us. I don’t know if she gets the wordplay there, about stepping inside love itself matched with calling the person to whom the invitation is aimed by the name “love” (which I do when addressing the Girl a lot, and sometimes hear my Grandpa’s Yorkshire accent when I do …). But, it’s become a song we can share, along with the ritual that is beginning to morph a bit as she gets older.

Recently, I realized that the Girl no longer needs my help stepping inside her pajama bottoms. And the pull-ups are long gone, of course. She’s five now. She’s a big girl.

“I guess you don’t need me to sing ‘Step Inside Love’ anymore.” I said to her.

She looked at me, a little wistfully. “You can still sing it to me.”

“Yes, I suppose I can. Will you sing with me?”

“Uh-huh.”

So, we sang.

The Girl, the Princess, The Pea, and Me

I stopped short during story-time this past weekend.

In reading to the Girl from a compendium of fairy tales, I chose the classic tale of the Princess and the Pea.  But, three or so sentences in, I had to stop.

“Let’s read this one. It’s a classic,” I said.

“Once upon a time, there was a prince. The Prince was sad because he couldn’t find anyone delicate enough to be a worthy bride. So, one day as a beautiful princess arrived in his kingdom, he decided to test her, to see whether or not she was delicate enough to …”

“You know what? Let’s not read this one.”

And we read a story about a pirate who sailed to a mysterious land to find his lost teddy-bear instead. OK, the pirate was a boy-pirate of course. But, anything was better than the Princess and the Pea.

Because for those three sentences, I realized a few things about the story that perhaps I had never fully understood, or saw. You all know the story, right? A pea is placed under the lowest mattress of a stack, and the Princess can’t sleep all night, because she’s so delicate that even the presence of a pea under that many mattresses doesn’t escape her sensitivity. So, the Prince finally knows she’s the one, delicate flower that she is. And they live, apparently, happily ever after.

Let’s unpack this.

First, that Prince has his head up his ass.

Anyone trying to meet those utterly sociopathic expectations of his would need to have a self-esteem level so low that it wouldn’t even register. So involved is he in finding who’s suitable for him, he’s ignored the fact that he’s a manipulative narcissist. What vegetable would we need to test for that, I wonder?

Second; I don’ t think that delicacy is something I want my daughter to aspire to. Actually, I’m sure it’s not.

Delicacy of the kind that’s held up as a virtue in this story would require a herculean amount of outside control to protect it, which I suppose is where the Prince comes in. There are no happily ever afters here. It is a completely damaging view of any sort of healthy relationship.

All of this got me thinking about these traditional stories, and how much I’d love to rewrite them. Unfortunately, my versions would leave the princes in them with not much to do.

I’d like to see Cinderella tell her stepmother and sisters to go screw, for example. I’d love to see her leave the house, set up on her own, and start a business.  Because failing that, her marriage to the Prince is merely a transfer of who it is that’s defining her identity and controlling her life.

I’d like to see Rapunzel cut her hair, and learn how to base-jump.  I’d like to see Snow White write a treatise on modern mining techniques during her time among the Dwarves, and create a reform movement in the kingdom that ousts any evil monarch, stepmother or no (note: stepmothers sure do get a raw deal in fairy tales) . I’d like to see the Little Mermaid dump the Prince, who’s too thick to know who really rescued him from drowning. And on and on. You get the idea.

Above all, I’d like to see more children’s stories where girls and women are shown to be strong as well as sensitive, and in control of their own fates without needing to adhere to some ideal of womanhood as dictated by some bland prince, who’s only virtue is his princeliness.

I’d like to read these to the Girl, and offer her an alternative vision of what it’s like to be female while still feeling the magic of mythical lands and peoples far away. Luckily, I have a number to choose from, including those by C.S Lewis, J.M Barrie, Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, and others.

Let’s forget delicacy. Let’s concentrate on the business of having adventures, boldly and with confidence, and without a prince to judge them.