In last week’s tongue-in-cheek post I shared lessons I’d learned from my children. Marija left a comment sharing some of the lessons she’d learned. One of them was that rocks and pine cones are treasures to collect, and the fact that they’re everywhere doesn’t diminish their preciousness, it just makes the collections grow larger. I laughed out loud as I read that, because I have experienced this phenomena myself on many occasions. My children like to collect rocks, leaves, sticks, little bits of moss, and so on. Each item they add to their collection is precious in their eyes, and cannot, under any circumstances, be parted with.
It’s actually kind of miraculous, the way that children look at the world without prejudice. They don’t have the experience to know what is considered valuable and rare, and what is considered ordinary. For them, a dandelion rates on the same level as a rose, or maybe even higher because dandelions don’t have thorns and you can blow their lacy seeds into the wind. They’re seeing the world with new eyes, and they find wonder in places that adults overlook.
Hannah’s crow embroidery
Sometimes it’s hard to see the miracle through the tedium, however. For example, when my daughter Hannah was in kindergarten her class studied crows. They learned crow facts, sang crow songs, read crow books, built scarecrows in their classroom, and held a crow party. It was a lovely, holistic, child-directed unit, and I was thrilled that she had a teacher who did that kind of thing. However, every time we saw a crow we had to stop and marvel over it. She asked me to take dozens of photos of each bird with my phone. The walk home from school doubled in length, as we treated crow sightings in the way adults might treat celebrity sightings. It didn’t take me long to be sick of crows.
My son Jacob is four years old and he has a thing for drinking fountains. He loves drinking fountains. We must stop at every drinking fountain we pass, so that he can take a drink. And if we’re visiting a place that has a drinking fountain, we have to stop off for a drink both when we arrive and when we leave. On the upside, he’s drinking water, and he’s being environmentally friendly. On the downside, it’s kind of awkward to hoist a preschooler up to the correct drinking fountain height with one hand, while operating the fountain with the other. It’s even more awkward when he wants to do it by himself, and you have to help him without letting on that you’re helping him, because you’re not up to having an argument as he dangles in mid-air from your arm, which is feeling his weight more with each second that passes.
Luckily this particular drinking fountain is very kid-friendly
It really is amazing to watch children who are enthralled by all the ordinary details of the world. It reminds you of the beauty that lurks everywhere. And yet as I add yet another pine cone to the nature shelf, or I snap yet another photo of a crow, I sort of wish that they would get over it already. If childhood is full of wonder, parenthood is full of ambivalence. I am in awe, and I am bored. And underneath it all I wonder if one day, when I live in a house without a stick collection and I never have to stop at drinking fountains if I don’t want to, whether I’ll miss it or just feel relieved.
What ordinary things are your kids enchanted by? Do they have any collections that threaten to take over your home? And how do you feel about it all? I want to know!
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Well um … ROCKS, DIRT, STICKS and ANY kind of leaf no matter how brown. Someone suggested I go “running” with Theo, and I kind of scratched my head … what? so I can stop every ten seconds to pick up one of the above?
Harriet’s last post … Look what’s in my mouth!
Twitter: MichelleStasiuk
says:
Beautiful post and interesting angle “Precious/Mundane”. How true it is that kids see things so differently and cherish things that seem just plain silly to us. My son is only 2, but has a fetish for motors (blenders, weed whackers, etc.) and we must “run” to see them or try to see them before they go off. I have no idea where this infatuation came from, but it is disruptive since a tantrum ensures if I don’t humour him to “go see”. While its not a collection over-taking my house, it is an obsession overtaking normal day-to-day functioning. And its tiresome sometimes. However, sometimes I’ve found myself getting really excited if I’m by myself and I hear a jack hammer or stump grinder or other loud back-firing vehicle. He’s definitely made me see things differently.
Michelle Stasiuk’s last post … I Know What I Want and I Want It Now
Love the honesty of this post. Someents I love my daughter’s immense rock collection, and then when she picks up another handful of gravel and insists on carrying it home, it makes me a bit nuts. She also has tons of shells, sea glass, and for a year we had a huge bucket of acorns that I finally got rid of. Leaves too, especially now in the fall. btw, she also loves water fountains. Doing the helping not helping thing is hard!
-Dana
Dana’s last post … Allergy Free Weekend Country Getaway
Twitter: blauelibelle
says:
Sprout is pretty obsessed with water fountains too. Though he likes splashing in them as much as drinking from them. The only mundane thing I can think of that he gets excited about is toilet paper tubes. He loves stuffing his arm into them. So far, he hasn’t gotten to the collecting stage yet.
Lisa C’s last post … Linnaeus 2.2
Twitter: mothersofchange
says:
I pretty much dig this post heavily.
I have a book, shell and rock collector.
A string collector remote control car obsessed money hoarder.
A stick loving already been chewed gum collector.
And an animal obsessed, backpack toting, shoe obsessed, sock obsessed, bug collecting daughter.
I have a rule about sticks, rocks, and detritus; you can enjoy it while we are out, but it lives in the park and needs to stay in the park. If and when it makes its way home? It doesn’t come inside the house or the van. Because detritus is not my cup of tea. And because there are four of them and their dad is a packrat so I make my boundaries.
=)
My toddler is (as I mentioned above) shoe and sock obsessed. She HAS to have them on before we leave the front door. The first thing she does in the van after being buckled up? Remove her shoes and socks and fling them all over the van. Then, when we arrive at our destination, she’s obsessed: “Doos! Locks! Doos! Locks! DOOSLOCKSDOOSLOCKSDOOSLOCKSDOOSLOCKS!!!” And you have to put them back on.
The funniest trick ever? Dressing her in tights. She spends the car ride screaming and trying to remove her ‘locks.’ OBSESSED. We arrive and she’s disheveled and has two foot long floppy skis on the end of her legs. But what does she say? DOOS! DOOS!
Kapow. Finger to temple. Kapow. But also reeeeeeeeally funny!
Melissa Vose’s last post … On Frustration, Fitness, and Identity
We’re still able to convince my daughter to leave rocks and sticks outside, but she does have a slight obsession/infatuation with the mailman. If we walk by one, she shouts “Mailman” and excitedly waves. When we drive, she points out all mail trucks, or just square trucks actually – bonus points if it’s a brown, square (UPS) truck. She also loves ledges and always stops to sit on them, even if the ledge is just an uneven crack in the sidewalk.
Twitter: bluebirdmama
says:
We recently visited the main Vancouver library for the first time since moving away 4 years ago to a very small town. First there was the excitement of parking underground! Then, of course, the elevators! Then necks craning, eyes widening and much oohing and aahing when we walked in the doors at ground level, marveling at the wondrous architecture and vastness of the main concourse. But the actual highlight? After 2 more elevator rides? My two big kids riding up the escalator from the main floor to the 2nd floor and right back down again all by themselves because I couldn’t go up it with the baby in the stroller. My daughter had never been on an escalator before and on the way back down, big brother hopped on without waiting for her. I got to watch and encourage and cheer her on from the bottom as she worked up the nerve to jump on…while holding up a line of people behind her…and the while, she and her brother clearly experiencing the escalator as something akin to a carnival ride, without an inkling that we should be quiet in the library. We were quite the spectacle, but it was worth it to see them wide open and drinking it all in without the apathy of the big city dwellers. I loved that an escalator ride and parking underground were as amazing to them as the beautiful building itself.
Alison @ Bluebirdmama’s last post … How We Do It