At the Greenleaf School
Ty is just about to finish his first mathematics workbook, which introduces one-to-one correspondence, addition, and subtraction. We began with a workbook from a different publishing company which was way too involved. Ty needed my help every minute. So now that we are almost finished with this simpler workbook, we’ll try the complicated one. See if that one works.
Kyle has started a preschool workbook that Ty used. I’m not a fan of teaching preschoolers to hold and use a pencil, so he does a lot of pointing and explaining: More and less (and sometimes fewer), big medium small, counting, recognizing capital and lower case letters.
Taylor colors. We have two coloring books with pages of large, solitary objects, and few lines. I put a page down in front of her, and she shreaks in glee of seeing a sheep. Then she proceeds to experiment with colors, asking which color she is holding, and using every crayon in the Zip-loc bag to draw rain on the poor, sleeping sheep. Meanwhile, she tears off the paper that covers each crayon. How else is she supposed to learn what a crayon feels like?
Ty asked a question that I didn’t know how to answer: “How does the crayon put the color on the paper?” If he asked that about a ball point pen, I could have helped him out. So instead of making something up, like, “It’s magic,” which would have been so much easier, I responded stupidly with, “The same way a pencil writes on paper.” He looked at me. “Mommy, you don’t know.”
You’re right, I don’t know. It just happens. The same way birds fly and bees make honey.
Speaking of Birds and Bees
I was flipping through A Child is Born when the Ty the Inquirer asked what all those pictures were. There comes a time in every parent’s battle for their child’s innocence to decide where their loyalties lie. Is it the Stork who brings the babies? Or do babies grow in Mommies? Well, our loyalties lie in empirical evidence. Never has a stork brought me a baby.
So I was honest with Ty. I pointed out the yolk sac of a tiny embryo. I explained how the baby got the nutrients he needed. He asked how the baby is supposed to come out… Through the birth canal, of course. I told him that I had a baby. “Can I feel it?” I put his hand low on my abdomen, and he was satisfied to feel something hard and sort of round.
“Mommy, how did you swallow the baby?” I answered that the baby wasn’t in my stomach. With the help of the book, I showed him where the baby actually was. “How did the baby get there?”
“Uh… Uhm…. Well, uh… I… uh….”
“Daddy put it there!” exclaimed Dad.
Whew. Ty was happy with the answer. Afterward, he and Dad had a similar discussion, man to man.
Taylor carries a doll around and calls it Baby. When I’m sitting on the couch or lying in bed, she brings the baby close to me so that I may nurse it. She doesn’t nurse her doll. She gives it the bottle.
