Just a little while ago, I had a complicated exchange with Gabe that resulted, ultimately, in neither of us becoming more enlightened.
For some time now, I've been adopting a perhaps unorthodox approach to teaching Gabe. From the time when it became possible to explain things to him, I've always attempted--with my first attempt, anyway--to explain things to him as if he were an adult. To my way of thinking, this will encourage him to think and act like an adult that much sooner, which is great considering adults tend to put far fewer clumps of dirt in their mouths (just yesterday, Gabe "tested" a handful of grass seed for its edibility). Not surprisingly, I've had limited success, and I usually end up having to "dumb it down" to the point where I'm going from something like "We have to be careful with sharp things because your skin is very thin and very fragile" to saying something like "This will give you an ouchie," but I'm persistent if nothing else. Most of our hang-ups tend to stem from various abstractions and his inability to grasp the concepts behind them.
Take our latest exchange, for instance. I put Butts down for her second nap (which I'm a little surprised she seems to be taking--she's been a terrible napper again this last week, sleeping only thirty minutes or so during the day, if at all) about a half hour ago. When I came down the stairs from her room, Gabe was in the dining room crashing his cars together in a decidedly calamitous way. When I got into the dining room, I said, "Shhh. I just put the baby down and we need to be quiet." He made an argument that I interpreted, perhaps incorrectly because it's always a crap shoot, as "Baby is upstairs, and I am downstairs. My noise is in this room, not upstairs."
"But this room is right underneath the baby's room," I pointed out. "So anything you do down here goes right through the ceiling into her room."
He looked up at the ceiling and gave me a look as if to say, "That's a ceiling. There's nothing there. Stupid."
So I pressed on, waiting for the little light bulb to go off above his head. "Baby's room is upstairs, right on the other side of this ceiling. See. Here's baby's room. Here's your room. Here's the landing, and here's Mommy and Daddy's room." I said, going into different rooms and pointing at the ceiling. "The upstairs is built right on top of the rooms that are downstairs."
"Baby's room in the sky," he decided. This conclusion was doubtless exacerbated by the new episode of "Ni Hao, Kai-Lan" we just finished watching shortly before Norah went to bed. In it, Kai-Lan and her friends visit another friend, Lulu, in her house. Lulu is a pink rhino whose primary means of transportation is to fly everywhere she goes, supported by a single balloon tied to her horn. Perfectly logical. So, obviously, she lives in a house in the clouds.
"Well, sort of," I had to concede. Compared to the ground floor, our second storey IS in the sky, just not very far. "But not really." This last bit had to be confusing, but I'm dealing with complicated issues here, and it's probably best that Gabe is exposed to "grey areas" from early on since life is filled with so many of them. "See the ceiling in this room?" I asked, pointing up. He nodded. "This ceiling is the floor to baby's room. And this ceiling is the floor to your room."
"My room upstairs," he replied flatly. He didn't actually shake his head at my nonsense, but I could tell that it was implied. This teaching moment, like so many before it, had gotten away from me. So I took the easy way out, "Baby is sleeping, we need to be quiet," I amended.
"Shhh. Tiptoe," he answered back. "Yes. Shhh. Tiptoe," I agreed. And that was the end of that. Some day, though, this is all going to pay off. Mark my words.
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