Just to remind ourselves that life is not ALL poop and oily hair, I wanted to take a brief moment to talk about some other things that are going on at LST headquarters. As I mentioned yesterday, I talked to a social worker about our current longest shortest time and I’ll be getting to that post as soon as I feel like I have more of a grip on what to make of the things she told me. But our conversation really boiled down to the question, What is happening in Sasha’s mind? In her emotional life.
Sasha is pretty verbal for her age but even so, it would be nearly impossible to get her to answer that question. She just doesn’t have the tools yet. I suppose many adults don’t have those either, so who can blame her? The ability she does have, though, is to communicate through play. That communication can be funny, it can be mysterious, and it can also be illuminating. Below are some glimpses into what Sasha’s recent play has told me.
I like to sew, so I have a ton of fabric scraps. One outlet for allowing Sasha to get messy in the apartment is to let her dig around in my box of scraps. She likes to move the pile from location to location a little at a time.
One day she ran to me beaming and said, “This is a piece of pillow!”
And, “This is a piece of bed!”
This doesn’t tell me anything super deep, except that she’s observant and making connections and storing information in her head. Which I guess means she has a strong visual memory. Which is perhaps part of why that poop in the tub made such a lasting impression. I know that many of you who read this blog are sewers and if that’s you, this is a fun twist on memory games. I call it What Is This a Piece Of?
Another thing she’s been doing is putting “Band-Aids” on her Play-Doh.
It is all she wants to do with the dough.
All little children I know are obsessed with Band-Aids (I know I was), so this is not particular to her. And she was doing this long before the poo incident, so I wouldn’t say it is directly related. But there must be something about this age and a desperate need to patch up boo-boos, both physical and emotional. Lord knows many of the “injuries” that I cover with Band-Aids are not visible. In fact, just this morning Sasha demanded that I put a round Band-Aid on the bottom of her foot, only to demand just as urgently two minutes later, “What is this on my foot?!”
One of the coolest new developments is that Sasha has been using her St. Patrick’s Day beads to create things. A dinosaur, Daddy’s face—here we have a whale.
I’m never sure if Sasha starts out thinking, “I’m going to make a whale out of this necklace,” or if she just lays the necklace down and discovers that it looks like something. Maybe a little of both. I have not yet started encouraging her to think abstractly like this, though we have been reading Eric Carle’s Little Cloud a lot recently, so maybe that began to open her mind in that way. This makes me wonder if her imagination ran wild when she saw the giant poo that came from within her own tiny body. What she imagined it could’ve been I can only guess. But the social worker I consulted had some ideas about what it might have represented to Sasha and as I said I will report on that soon.
This has been a hard time but I must say that when I can take a step back from the tension and the tantrums I find the psychological piece of it fascinating.
What clues have your children given you on the inner workings of their busy minds?
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We Can’t Stop Reading
We Can’t Stop Watching
My 27 month-old son will sometimes select books from his collection on a theme. Enzo will carefully and intentionally choose all farm books or all ocean books, etc. He started doing this quite a while ago (well before he was 2), and I found it fascinating for him to start making those connections.
He also loves to draw. He will sometimes draw a random picture (scribbles) on every page, but he always identifies it as something. One time he started with a cow, then switched colors and drew a chicken, then a farmer, then corn, then a sheep, then bees. Sometimes he will ask me to draw something on his page, but whenever I do, he immediately cries and screams for me to “take it off!!!”
Enzo wears a bandaid somewhere on his body almost every day. At first he’ll limp around holding the bandaged part. He always says that he got hurt falling down the stairs. A couple of months ago, he did fall down the stairs twice within a couple of weeks.
I am now 19 weeks pregnant with identical twins, and a few weeks ago, he lifted up his shirt and announced to his cousins, “I have two babies in my belly!” I have no idea how much a two year-old can understand about a baby coming, but he talks about it all the time. Like you, I wish I could better understand what he is thinking and feeling. I am sure it must be especially difficult when your child is showing you signs of distress.
“our current longest shortest time…”
It seems lame, but I’m glad to see multiple longest-shortest-times acknowledged. I just sent in a woeful submission about our 14 month-old who has a very hard time sleeping and has recently gotten worse. Dude had at least slept in his crib for an hour or two when we’d first put him down. My DW and I could carry on a conversation. A whole one. Now, no more crib sleeping. Practically no more conversations. And it’s making me crazy-pants.
He’s doing new stuff all the time, and it’s fantastic to see him grow. It’s hard to see these new things as the end of an LST. They often don’t really seem to be related. Meanwhile these sleep issues keep making this shortest time longer.
Here’s hoping this longest shortest time has…um…passed. But it’s many months later, and I’m still wondering how this turned out. It amazes me that so many ignore children’s inner minds, and I’m really curious what the social worker shared with you, if you have a free moment to post.
Laura, thanks for asking. This did eventually resolve, though it morphed into a new and super intense LST that I never anticipated. I have only recently been able to start to wrap my head around everything. I’ll definitely post about it (hopefully soon!) but need to figure out how to share it. In the meantime, I have been working with some amazingly talented people on adapting one of my favorite LST episodes into an animated video. Can’t wait to release that in the near future.