Other states, other lives, other souls

My first career was in early childhood education. It was an exciting time when preschool childcare centers meant that women could continue careers, enter graduate programs, and work without worrying about how their children were getting along during the day.  After moving to Minneapolis in 1974, I found myself working in a parent coop with children from 3 years to pre-kindergarten.  Seward Coop is where I decided that my favorite age of childhood was 4.  Seward Coop was also where I found my second and final husband.

Four year olds, in general, have one foot in the real world and one in another universe of their own devising.  If one 4 year old says she has a dragon in her backyard, a second four year old will insist that he has one too.  Imaginary friends at the snack table are nothing to worry about. Power capes are de rigeur. At the same time, they can be very insistent on their recently-acquired knowledge of how the real world is organized. They must wear this dress and put on those shoes by themselves, no matter how long it takes. They eat pizza with delight one day and hate it the next.  They memorize all the names of real dinosaurs, and don’t try to correct them that the brontosaurus is actually called apatosaurus. Boys are ninjas and girls are princesses.  Actually is a favorite first word in many a 4 year old sentence.

Fast forward forty years or so and my husband and I now have our own 4 year old grandson to observe. When our own children were four I think we were busier managing jobs, household, childrearing and politics to be as attentive to their perspective as we are now as grandparents.  A couple of mornings a week we take Theodore to play, either at our house or somewhere outside.  It is then that we visit Theo World.

In Theo World, his bedroom is filled with named objects. The red stuffed dragon is named Flier and is put to bed below his new Ikea top bunk with a blanket and pillow before Theo heads up to sleep.  There is a small crocodile perched on a narrow wood support just outside his top bunk, to protect him during the night. Before an adult leaves his room for the night, the person must sing a song. It goes “la, la, la, la, la, la.” That’s it. Lights out.

His matryoshka dolls are carefully arranged on his bedroom play table.  These are his current obsession, a variation on a recurring theme of graduating shapes, ordered alphabet letters and numbers, and containers filled with small treasures. At our house we have another matryoshka set given to us by a niece studying in Russia back in her college days.  He prefers this version right now to the babushka version, assigning each doll as a member of his family and ignoring the painted faces of big Putin (boo!), Yeltsin, Gorbachev (complete with strawberry birthmark), Stalin and baby Lenin. Khrushchev has been erased from matryoshka history, but we have an old postcard with him and Nixon together in the Kitchen of the Future debate that gives that the lie. Theo has also created a mini-matryoshka set made from shells.

His constant playmates, when live ones are not available, are the “kids”—the fore and middle finger legs on each hand, who have a lot of fun themselves, sliding down slides he has created, walking in the woods, and lifting heavy objects.  We try to appreciate the “kids’” achievements as well.

At the same time, he is fascinated by the laws and objects in the physical world. His favorite force right now is gravity, the one that is holding him to the earth and causes objects to drop to the floor.  At Thanksgiving dinner last year, he was squirreling around on our lightweight plastic Eames knock-off chair (no pun intended) when it suddenly fell over, with him in it. In seconds he jumped up with a smile on his face saying to the assembled guests: “That’s gravity!”  He has memorized all the planets and their order from the sun. He knows Pluto is not a planet anymore. Balls and marbles of varying sizes become transitory solar system models.   His father reports that when he first learned about searching Google images, he chose volcanoes, icebergs, dinosaurs and planets.

Recently, while we were talking about gravity, I started talking about places where there isn’t gravity and showed him a Nasa YouTube video of an astronaut floating about the space station, demonstrating zero gravity.  Mind-blowing.  Recently on a playdate car ride we were discussing how astronauts get down from the space station.  The capsule starts with no gravity, powers down (Up? Across?) to Earth’s atmosphere where gravity takes hold, which then pulls so hard that heat and speed threaten to burn up the capsule and astronauts.  We said it had to be slowed down by some parachutes.  Immediately he showed us the “kids” floating down under a hand parachute with a very realistic hand swaying motion.

A few weeks ago I was bequeathed a bucket of clear glass marbles by a neighbor selling her house.  I think this is going to keep Theo busy in Theo World until his fifth birthday.  In case you are wondering, he is also starting to play soccer, runs fast, enjoys climbing structures, plays with real kids, loves to dance, makes his baby sister laugh and can speak two languages fluently.  But this post was about Theo World, and with all the rainy days we have been having, Theo World keeps him happy and busy inside.

One of my first jobs after college graduation was secretary at a new private school for “gifted and “talented” students. Nueva Day School.  One of the tests done with kindergarten age children to see if they qualified to attend was a creativity test developed by a Stanford professor. This was in 1968, long before Paul Torrance developed what is now the gold standard in testing creativity. I was charged with administering the test, due to my new early childhood degree. I was given four household objects and a record sheet.  I don’t remember all four objects, but the two I remember were a coffee cup and a metal coat hanger. I would hold up one–say, the coffee cup–and ask “How many things can you think of to do with this?” I would write down each response.  This was a test of fluency, an aspect of creativity that describes the ability to generate multiple ideas.  I haven’t tried it with Theo, but I bet he would ace it.