this woman’s work

I have a cold and am hung over on generic Nyquil but I’m also on the mend so the hangover is worth it. Luckily caffeine is helping me come back to the land of the coginizant.

Pennie is coming over today. We’re driving her to the airport tomorrow to go visit her brother who is on his way back to Iraq for another tour of duty. She’ll be seeing her mom and little sister, too, so Madison is supposed to make art for them. Currently all of her art consists of letters and almost-letters. I think this is from hanging with Maya. She draws her E’s with about five lines but they’re still recognizably E’s. Also her new favorite television show is Electric Company. It almost makes me wish I believed in drilling with worksheets and flashcards so that I could force her to early achievement for my own twisted need for educational gratification! (I kid! I kid!)

So Madison is brilliant — we know that. You may remember that I’ve mentioned her ability to identify car makes and models from weird angles. One way she does it is by noticing hub caps. She can spot hub caps and say, “Hey! That’s the kind of wheels that Grandpa has! But that’s not his car!” The other day I saw an enormous gray minivan and thought it looked like ours and I said, “Hey, Madison! Isn’t that like our car?” She glanced up and said, “No, that’s a Caramel.” Sure enough, it was a Dodge Caravan.

I commented elsewhere that I was going to blog this. Madison’s maternal birth family has some interesting stuff going on. I won’t be specific in the interest of privacy but there’s some Asperger’s milling about and some ADHD and some giftedness and some left-handedness. (Pennie is left-handed and gifted.) I think all of these things are related. I think they’re all on the continuum.

Madison is left-handed, she has this weird car thing, she has a ridiculously good memory, has great verbal skills, has non-stop energy, walked before babies should ever learn to walk and she has some sensory stuff that doesn’t seem to hamper her. (She spins a lot without getting dizzy, basically. The more tired she is, the more she spins. She also has a tendency to make enormous sensory-seeking messes.)

Her sensory stuff is so much less obstructive than mine (or Noah’s). I have never had to sit with her while she had a mental breakdown over something seemingly minor the way I’ve had to with Noah. She’s much more willing to leap although she’s more cautious than I would have expected (because as a baby, she was prone to interesting adventures). Her curiosity and impulsivity does get her into trouble and I still can’t leave her alone in a room for more than ten minutes because she’s able to find tons of loopholes to our rules and discover new and improved ways to make a mess. Like I never had to stop Noah from writing on a table but I’ve had to stop her many times — a crayon, after all, is different than a marker or a pencil and she’s been curious about how all of them work on our formica tabletop.

The other day she was talking to me about something while she was holding a marker and as she was talking, I saw her eyes bore in on the back of the chair she was sitting in and then she leaned in and began to scribble. She startled when I stopped her. She just wasn’t thinking and that’s pretty typical for her.

Our Madison survival tactics are centered on finding things she CAN destroy in the interest of science. She started to put stickers on our hardwood floor to make them pretty and I stopped her and redirected her to her train table instead — stuff like that. Our train table is now beautiful with stickers. But she’s more clever than I am so I’m often too late to this stuff. It just wouldn’t occur to ME to unravel the toilet paper roll to get the cardboard inners and then unroll that and tear it into tiny pieces to see if they stick to the mirror while wet. See, I never made a rule about it because it never occurred to me.

(When I found her, she was standing with her pants still around her ankles, dreamily humming to herself while the water pooled all over the counter top and the mirror dripped with the soggy cardboard.)

Madison is always dismayed when she discovers that she’s done something wrong; her intentions are inevitably good. In fact, she’s so upset when reprimanded that I’ve had to reiterate that she’s two or three or four or whatever age she is when the mess/crisis happens and that she’ll be better about following rules as she gets older.

“I am here to remind you,” I tell her. “I get frustrated — that’s why I get mad. But I know you’re only two/three/four, too. Next time you’ll know not to do this.”

You know what else I think is interesting? She loves to mix stuff up — she loves to add water to everything. But she also likes to make stuff pretty (thus the wet cardboard on the mirror). And Pennie is, of course, studying to be a chef. I think when you take a scientist interested in art you very often get a chef. I wouldn’t be surprised if she followed in Pennie’s footsteps. (Truly her number one most favorite thing to do is help me bake.)

I’ve mentioned before that she likes to find new and bizarre ways to use regular toys. Last year I talked to someone I knew in early childhood education (ECE) about it because I wanted to know the roots of it. I mean, I wanted to know why she was more prone to look for weird ways to use stuff than Noah was. (Not that Noah lacked for imagination — he had a very complex imaginary narrative going on most times.) The ECE person just said she was old enough to start following rules and that I ought to come down on her more to keep puzzles in the puzzle boxes and quit swiping all the toilet paper to make blankets for her babies.

I disagree with that ECE expert. I’m more interested in helping her stick to exploring and also find ways to help her explore less destructively. I don’t really care how she plays with her own toys. I don’t care if her dolls have marker on their faces to make them “beautiful” or if she cuts open a stuffed animal to see what’s inside, provided it’s her own stuffed animal. I don’t care if she take the collection of dice in the game cupboard and dumps them into a plastic stewpot filled with water to make soup. Why not? Who says dice always have to be dice? So if I come into the family room and find all the family shoes turned into beds for her babies, who’s to say that this is the wrong way to play? Obviously I’m not thrilled when the puzzle pieces get steeped in water to make tea and come out too swollen to use ever again or when I discover all of the handsoap was used up in an experiment so yeah, we’re teaching limits but limits that work for both of us because her curiosity deserves respect, too.

That just seemed like weird advice coming from an ECE expert but then I figured most ECE people learned in preschool environments where you do have to keep chaos to a minimum and you’ve got to be a little more tightly reined in. (We had a little girl like Madison in my preschool program when I taught and she was the most interesting and most frustrating of all the kids. She was got extremely fed up with all of our rules and restrictions and kept us on our toes finding bizarre loopholes.)

I’m still interested in knowing how Madison’s mind works. She’s not that different from other preschoolers I have known but she’s just more. More active, more chatty, more everything. It’s hard to explain on blog because I can’t convey her prodigious energy. You’d have to meet her. (Ask Abby. Ask Kristen, too, because she got one of these “more” preschoolers in her own house.) My mom used to say I was exaggerating until she spent an afternoon babysitting. Now she sends her home with exhausted kudos to Brett and me. Madison is like preschooler squared.

But Madison is also more cheerful; she enjoys everything absolutely. Her reactions are big and bright and happy. She’s quick to yell, quick to whine but always orients back to happy. That’s just where her set point is, you know? She’s set somewhere on happy. (I think Pennie is similar. When we talk about the stuff I write about here — my adoption worries, my transracial parenting worries, Pennie is always laughing and telling me to relax, it’s ok.) Taking Madison to any event is always gratifying because she appreciates it so much. She’s the kind who squeals and cheers on the merry-go-round. (Noah was the kid with a very serious, very stern, very concentrated expression as he went around on his pony. Or the one who got to the exciting party and burst into tears. He never did sit on Santa’s lap.)

Way back when I said I wanted a daughter like Ramona the Pest and I think I have one. I feel very blessed and just a tiny bit tired.

Courtesy of Lynn, fellow homeschool mama: The New Gender Gap

The “earliness” push, in which schools are pressured to show kids achieving the same standards by the same age or risk losing funding, is also far more damaging to boys, according to Lilian G. Katz, co-director of ERIC Clearinghouse on Elementary and Early Childhood Education. Even the nerves on boys’ fingers develop later than girls’, making it difficult to hold a pencil and push out perfect cursive. These developmental differences often unfairly sideline boys as slow or dumb, planting a distaste for school as early as the first grade.

Instead of catering to boys’ learning styles, Pollock and others argue, many schools are force-fitting them into an unnatural mold. The reigning sit-still-and-listen paradigm isn’t ideal for either sex. But it’s one girls often tolerate better than boys. Girls have more intricate sensory capacities and biosocial aptitudes to decipher exactly what the teacher wants, whereas boys tend to be more anti-authoritarian, competitive, and risk-taking. They often don’t bother with such details as writing their names in the exact place instructed by the teacher.

Read more here.