The Longest Shortest Time

Clues

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.

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?

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. 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?