Outgoing
Yesterday Madison was playing with a couple of refrigerator magnets.
“Look!” she squealed. “They fly together!”
She meant the magnetic attraction. It made me think of Noah at that age, also fascinated with magnets (on his brio train set — Madison doesn’t have the patience for the train set). Only he kept his discoveries to himself. If an adult — not a parent — would comment about what he was doing, he would stop and wait patiently for them to leave him alone, blinking his big blue eyes at them.
Madison invites participation; she solicits it. Noah was wary and discouraged outsider attention.
Noah’s first preschool teacher understood this about him and she loved him. She was patient, waiting to be invited and finding ways to support his need to observe but not feel observed himself. His next preschool teacher was a high-energy extrovert and she didn’t get him. She liked him — at least I think she did — but she was puzzled by him. Participation, she felt, was fun! So she couldn’t understand his need to sit on the sidelines.
Noah recently said that he hated that teacher but he’s wrong. At the time he thought she was funny so I think he’s remembering the stress of her leading his small group and forgetting the entertainment that went along with it.
I see how in this way life is going to be easier for Madison because the world loves an extrovert. She stands in our front lawn and waves to people walking their dogs past our house.
“Hi!” she hollers. “How’s it going? This is my brother Noah. We’re eating popsicles.”
She’s genuinely interested in other people and anxious to share her happy events with them. She’s bossy but generous and she likes to be a help. I think she’s going to shine at preschool.
She asked her teacher’s name today and I said it was Miss Lisa.
“Like Miss Anna!” she said. “Now I have a gym teacher AND a school teacher!”
She was playing in the water table full of shaving cream while we were chatting and her bathtub doll, Naked Baby, got shaving cream in her eyes and Madison was upset because she knows shaving cream is painful in one’s eyes.
“It’s ok,” I told her. “Because she’s a doll.”
Madison gave me a withering look.
“She is a person,” she corrected and carefully wiped the shaving cream away.
“Hey,” she offered at lunch. “Do you want me to sing Miss Mary Mack for you? Just let me swallow this grape in my mouth and I’ll sing it for you.”
When she and Brett go car shopping (he thought he found the one he wanted but the gas mileage was lousy) she chats up the salesman who ply her with balloons and lollipops. Observing the back-facing seats in a Camry stationwagon she said, “I have a brother named Noah and he is going to LOVE those seats!” (As you can tell, she likes to brag on having a big brother.)
And she’s brave. She’s afraid of the lawn mower and she’s afraid of the race car our neighbor is rebuilding because it roars when he starts it up. Yesterday she got out of the car to find Gramps had dropped the lawn mower off in our driveway. She walked over to it, bravely confronting her enemy and screamed: “DIE LAWNMOWER, DIE!” Then later she and Brett took a walk and passed the neighbor with the race car working on his yard.
“I don’t like your race car,” she told him. “We don’t have a race car because we are nice people.” (The guy has a 3-year old himself so he laughed and told her he understood.)
I love her welcoming attitude toward the world. I wish I could bottle it up and borrow it.
I miss Ramona Quimby SO much. Charisma? She’s got it, that charmer of yours…
just checking in after some time away — Our younger guy sounds like Madison, except his sentences are MUCH more difficult to understand, so he gets a lot of puzzled smiles.
Also, congrats on the work coming in. When you’re doing what you’re meant to do, it does seem to flow in. My Dh found that when he went free lance.
Oh. My. Word. She and Nate sound so much alike — talking to everyone, so, so extroverted. Except that he LOVES lawn mowers and race cars, BUT he has to cover his ears when they start up and he’s close by because the noise part does bother him.
As I often say, Nate has never met anyone who isn’t a friend. This isn’t always a good thing, though. As, for example, he was giving our phone number to the kid who was an indeterminate number of years older (3? 4?) who he had met two minutes before at Borders who asked him for it. We were trying to get to our car at the parking lot and the kid said that he needed us to come back and give it to his mother so he could remember it. Nate starts going back to this kid, but I go back and grab Nate’s arm and Take Him To Our Car, all the time with Nate protesting, “He just wants our phone number so he can call us.”
Most of the time it’s a fun thing, this extroversion. Sometimes, not so much.
Isn’t adoption great for stirring up the gene pool like that? Nat is just like this. Whenever I read what Madison’s up to, I can count on Nat being up to it in a year. And we’d have never produced such a child with our own DNA…
I love that bit about the race car, and you being nice people. What a ham.
My extremely extroverted husband once explained to me that strangers are merely friends he hasn’t met yet. I don’t understand people like him and Madison, but I’m glad they’re in the world.
Audrey, who is 5, is like that. When she and I went to the Gulf this summer, she waded right out into the water to a man who was playing with his little boy. “I’m Audrey! My mommy brought me to the beach for the first time! Granny didn’t want to come down to the beach, so she’s up in that pavalon with the stairs! Have you been to the beach before?”
And when we run into any neighbor, she begins talking mid-thought–as if they’d been conversing for a while–about whatever book she’s been reading (too often, a Captain Underpants) or what a friend said that day or just whatever. She truly doesn’t know a stranger, and it makes me so sad when I have to remind her that not everyone is nice and good.
As for loud noises–Audrey fears all vehicles, home improvement store forklifts, trains, lawnmowers. etc.
Because this entry is about Madison, I thought I might post again and tell you that I read your essay in Brain, Child today! Very cool and interesting. I enjoyed it very much–and I got all excited when I saw your name. “Oh!” I exclaimed to my husband, “There’s an essay in here from a blogger I’ve been reading for a long time!”