It really got me thinking, that likely no matter what my kids are interested in, we can find resources to help them really experience and learn about their interests. It really does make me wonder why some people still think public school is necessary. I’m not trying to start a debate about public vs home school, that’s been done many times, but more to comment on how easy it is for kids to learn anything they need to know just by doing things they love to do.

I remember in grade 11, I adored genetics. To me, it was the coolest part of school. I looked forward to my biology classes when we were doing the genetics unit. We did one unit in Bio 11 and one in Bio 12 (I did both courses in grade 11), and I couldn’t get enough. (And, though I got really good grades, I wasn’t a good student by most people’s definitions. I skipped a lot of school and procrastinated until the last minute on most of my homework. But I never skipped bio.) I read the textbook during lunch periods, and even asked my teacher if there were other things I could do or read to learn more about it. He told me I’d have to wait until university. And that was basically the end of that. By the time I got to university, my interest had waned somewhat. I would have had to take a bunch of prerequisite courses that weren’t even relevant to genetics before I could begin to take the actual genetics courses. I never did get to them. I had no support or help in pursuing my interest outside of school, even though at the time I thought the best job in the world would be to be some sort of geneticist or gene researcher or… But alas, I had school work to do and as far as my parents and teachers were concerned, that was far more important than my interest in genetics. I wonder sometimes how far I would have taken that interest had I had the time and resources to pursue it further.

Kris and I were talking recently about how we think it’s good for the kids to see us pursuing our own interests too. I want to take a class that’s held locally about local herbs and plants and in the end you end up with your own herbal tea made completely from local plants. He’s thinking of taking some drawing courses. I’d love to do photography and guitar lessons in the future. I believe it’s important for our kids to see that learning happens all the time, and at any age, and that any interest is worth pursuing, even if the only real point is that it’s something you enjoy.

I can’t afford photography or guitar lessons right now, so I’m teaching myself both. Photography by taking lots of pictures and practicing on friend’s children, guitar lessons through books and online courses. I want to learn cello in the future, and one day we’ll have a piano again and I’ll likely play almost every day. I hope to play flute and/or piccolo in an orchestra or band again. Kris sometimes goes for walks just to sit somewhere quiet and draw. I think it’s great for Meredith and Fiona to see us doing things just for our own pleasure.

I have to be honest, I’m really looking forward to a few years in the future when my kids really start having these separate interests and hobbies and wanting to learn about new things. I think it will be really interesting for all of us to find resources: courses, people, games, books, movies… Basically whatever we need is likely out there. And I love that my kids won’t be restricted to learning only what someone else feels it’s necessary they should learn, or feeling they don’t have time to do what they want because of school and homework.

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She’s showing signs of being able to count a little bit. I have three rings that she likes to play with, and if I only give her two she knows one is missing. She counts them with me sometimes. She likes us to count before she goes down the slide, and then she’ll yell “Gooo” and push herself off. But she waits until we get to three, and if I only count to two, or if I miss one or say the wrong number, she doesn’t go down. I find this a bit funny because it’s an idea she got in her head all on her own, I never told her she couldn’t go down until I counted or anything like that.

She’s known the colour purple for a few months now, but she’s starting to differentiate other colours too. We have some beads I bought, and I got her to help me sort them the other day. She picked out a blue one and held it up and said “boo” with no prompting from me. She doesn’t say pink yet, but when I asked her to grab a pink bead, she knew which one I meant. Orange is another colour I think she knows.

I think she knows a few letters too. In fact, she’s very curious about the alphabet. We bought a foam letter puzzle for the bath tub, and she loves to ask what each letter is. One of her first words was “this?” which she used to ask while pointing at objects, wanting us to name them, and now she uses it for letters. I have scrapbooking letter punches that she is intrigued with and loves to pick them up and ask what each is. Kris and I go walking each night, and we often pass by signs that are low enough to the ground for her to point to the letters, and she will sometimes spend a few minutes in front of them pointing at letters and wanting to know what each is. She seems very interested in the letter “I” especially. I think because she knows where her eyes are on her face and at first she couldn’t figure out how a line on a sign was called the same thing as her eye. She used to point at her eye and say “eye” and then point at the I on the sign and ask “I?” But she knows a few others as well. We were cleaning up the foam puzzle and I asked her to grab the “k” and she grabbed the right one even though there were others that were closer to her than that one.

It’s really amazing watching her learn and internalize the world around her, and how interested she is in learning! That’s definitely something I hope she never loses. There’s so much she can learn and do just by playing and interacting with everything around us.

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We did the “helicopter” first. I gave her several sheets of paper as well as crayons and stickers, but she chose to decorate solely with a pencil. She had a lot of fun helping me measure for cutting.

The helicopter was made by cutting a strip of paper, and then some folds and cuts, and a paper clip gets put on one end. I did that part and I didn’t get pictures of it in progress. Once it was done, I showed Meredith how to use it and she had a blast throwing it up in the air and watching it spin slowly to the ground. I gave her some other things to try and throw, and pointed out that the helicopter fell a lot slower than something like her bouncy balls.

Meredith holding the finished helicopter

Not sure what to do yet

Getting ready to throw it

Watching it fall to the ground

Dismantling it afterwards was half the fun!

Next we made an airplane from the same book. She wanted to use the same paper we had used for the helicopter. Basically, you make a regular paper airplane, and then thread an elastic band through a hole under the wing. It is supposed to demonstrate different types of energy. Meredith couldn’t really fly the plane on her own, so I did it for the most part. I showed her what happened when I threw it with and without the elastic band. I think she just had fun watching it go flying and then running after it. Kris had more fun than she did when he got home from work later.

The finished airplane

Playing with the elastic

She pulled the elastic tight and snapped it back a few times, as well as experimenting with what happened if she let go of the plane instead of the elastic.

I have an idea for something I’d like to try for this week’s theme, which is science. I think it would be fun to do with someone else though, so I’m going to see if Kyre and her son want to join us for that one.

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Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
-Chinese Proverb

I read somewhere once that children are redirected or told no on average every nine seconds. Now, I have no idea how this stat came to be, because how would you study that? But anyway, it’s an interesting thought nonetheless. Imagine being at work and having your boss tell you you’re doing it wrong or trying to show you how to do it better every nine seconds. I think most of us would go insane and/or quit pretty quickly.

We wanted to avoid having to be constantly saying no to Meredith, but more and more babyproofing seemed like the wrong direction to go too. We don’t have baby gates even though we have stairs, only a few of our outlets have the little safety things in them (and Meredith can pull them out easier than I can anyway, since I don’t have nails), our stereo equipment is at ground level, and we don’t have locks on our cupboard doors. I kept meaning to babyproof, I felt that not doing so was a recipe for disaster. But as time went on, it started to seem so unnecessary.

So how to avoid saying no while still keeping Meredith and our belongings safe and not excessively baby proofing? It’s actually really simple. We let her learn what to do while remaining nearby in case we’re needed. We make sure we’re very aware of where she is and what she’s doing, as well as anything around her that could be dangerous (or that she could be too rough with without meaning to).

The stairs are a perfect example. She started crawling at 6 months and was interested in the stairs right away. We let her experiment on them as much as she wanted and were right nearby in case of a fall, especially at first. And she did fall a few times, though she never hurt herself as we would catch her and comfort her if needed and then she would normally want to try again. We didn’t push her to learn it, or try and set her on the stairs every day, or move her arms and legs through the motions to try and teach her how, we just let her go at her own pace and figure it out on her own. She learned pretty quickly how to get up the stairs and rarely fell. (The video is of her around 6 1/2 months, but it’s not a great video because I’m spotting her while I film.) Around 8 months she figured out how to get down the stairs (again, on her own).

I think for me, the biggest problem with baby proofing is that it doesn’t teach a child how to handle a situation should the baby proofing fail. What if you forgot to put the baby gate up but assumed it was there? Or your child can pull outlet covers out? Or you left your glasses on the table where your child can reach them? I’m of the opinion that it is much safer to rely on your child and yourself to keep your child safe than to rely on devices that could be forgotten, break, or fail in some other way.

Obviously, this doesn’t mean I would give Meredith a knife and point her at an outlet and let her see what happens. And there are times when “no” or redirection are definitely appropriate. But telling her she can’t touch our DVD player when she sees us using it frequently just makes it seem even more desirable to her. Instead, letting her play with the buttons while being supervised, explaining that food and drinks shouldn’t be near it, and helping her discover how it works keep it safe while honoring her desire to participate in something she sees us doing. Now we can ask her to turn it on or off for us if she’s nearby, and she has figured out the volume controls as well. My parents tell stories about sandwiches ending up in their VCR. We have shown Meredith how to put DVD’s in the player and she doesn’t seem to have any desire to put anything else in there. My belief is that kids do things like putting sandwiches in VCR’s because they see us putting things in and want to do what we do, not because they’re trying to cause trouble or make us mad.

This can be applied to all sorts of situations. I feel it’s far better to let children explore and learn at their own pace, giving them information or guidance only as needed. In doing so, I’ve discovered that she’s surprisingly gentle with books, careful with dishes, and she will even clean up after herself after playing with water on the floor. There are things, like my expensive camera, that I don’t want her playing with. But if I leave my camera in her reach and she finds it, even then I don’t immediately wrench it out of her grasp. I’ll ask her for it, and often she will hand it to me and go on with something else. The times when she really wants to play with it, I will sit her on my lap and let her put the lens cap on and off or press some buttons while I watch, and then when she’s bored I put it up out of the way and make a mental note to myself not to leave it in her reach again.

When my instinct is to say no or stop something Meredith is doing, I try and ask myself why and then look for ways to allow her to continue while relieving my own worries (or, in some cases, just realizing that my concerns are a gut reaction that may not even be true). Is it because I don’t want her to make a mess? If I’m really adverse to cleaning up a mess at that time, maybe I could relocate what she’s doing to the bathtub or into the sink. (Though honestly, mostly I don’t mind the messes at all.) Am I worried she will hurt herself? Is there some way I can make it safer? etc.

Helping children discover how to handle themselves in various situations is better in the long run than just trying to avoid those situations until some abitrary age in the future when the children are “old enough”. And when they’re allowed to explore and shown how to safely use these things, it means they’re less likely to damage something or hurt themselves later on when faced with a similar situation.

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It also means that instead of crawling around to get toys she wants, she sits (or stands) wherever she is and points at what she wants and yells. I’m a big believer in allowing her to play without interference from me. I am there if she needs me or seems to want me to join in, but most of the time I am reading, or doing dishes, or whatnot, and she is doing her own thing nearby. But I am needing to be there for her much more recently, to help her get to where she wants to go. I don’t jump up and go running at the first peep though. If she drops a toy or something quite close to her and wants me to get it, I might say something like: “Oops, you dropped that block. I bet you can reach over and grab it pretty easily” first. I don’t let her get to the point that she’s really frustrated or upset, but often just pausing and saying something like that is enough that she will grab it on her own quite happily. And if not, I don’t mind doing it for her. I know her intention is not to be lazy or bossy.

I think she may be teething again, which of course might have something to do with her wanting us to do more for her recently.

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