child development

How to Introduce Books to Your Baby to Help Them Love Reading

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 2 Comments

Text: "How to Introduce Books to Your Baby to Help Them Love Reading / We'll Eat You Up, We Love You So" Photo: Four children's board books on a wooden table

“Where everyone is napping,” I read, as my baby crawled off my lap. Soon, he was across the room and out the door. With him gone, who was I reading to now? As cute as The Napping House is, it’s not the book I would pick for myself.

Babies are not easy audiences. Nonetheless, reading to them is essential. The American Pediatric Association appears to agree, with a recommendation to read to children – even babies – every day. While “every day” is tough, it’s still a good goal. But besides remembering to do so in a sleep-addled state, the idea of reading to a squirming baby can be intimating.

From my experience, here are a few tips for reading to very young children:

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Montessori Practical Life Skills for Modern Times

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment

My son is in a Montessori playgroup, so I’ve spent a decent amount of time browsing descriptions of the philosophy as well as activity suggestions on Pinterest. While I agree with its broad aims of child-led education and teaching practical skills, one thing that frustrates me is that the curriculums don’t seem to be updated to reflect modern times. And I’m not even talking about computers. While some of the skills taught are great, like gardening, others are downright archaic, grown out of date through the development of technology or culture. For example, I certainly don’t iron handkerchiefs, arrange flowers, polish silver or wash chalkboards on a regular basis. (These are some of the tasks mentioned in Montessori presentations and Montessori websites about Practical Life Skills.) Instead, I offer a suggested list of updated activities and life skills that Montessori or not, practical-minded parents and teachers may want to integrate into their children’s learning. These are skills that I do use very regularly, some learned from my parents and some through trial and error. I’ve gained as an adult through some amount of trial and error, building on my parents’ well-intentioned efforts to teach me them when I was younger, which I often ignored.

Picking out and cooking vegetables: Food preparation is a pretty big part of the Montesorri curriculum, from what I can tell. They actually teach kids to use knives properly, which is both great and something my junior high home-Ec class failed to teach me. (The main thing Home-Ec taught me about kitchen knives was to be afraid of them.) Picking out and cooking vegetables is the next step up, but definitely a skill that an elementary school student could learn under supervision. I think it’s essential for kids to learn how to cook vegetables in particular because there’s such a cultural prejudice against them. Children are already told by society that they should dislike vegetables. In contrast, part of the reason many of us love to bake cookies at Christmas or pie at Thanksgiving is because we fondly remember doing so with our parents or grandparents. If most people looked back on cooking tomato sauce, preparing sweet potatoes, or sauteeing broccoli with their families, I think we’d all eat a lot more veggies. Involving kids in the process builds that inherent fondness, staves off some of that cultural negativity and helps them feel responsible for the end product. Even if a kid is too young to even go near the stove, parents and teachers can still talk about what vegetables are in season and how you can tell if a vegetable is fresh. In terms of specific learning goals, this allows you to talk about seasons, months of the calendar, problem solving (if this isn’t in season, what can I use instead?), and characteristics of a vegetable like color, firmness and flavor. In field or shopping trips to the farmers’ markets, children can ask farmers questions, learning about agriculture as a career and different growing methods. For older kids, this can feed into conversations about environmental impacts, the transport of goods, and plant life cycles.

Taking care of animals: Everyone knows that taking care of an animal can be great for teaching responsibility, but no parent wants the poor animal to suffer through the child’s learning process. But both parents and teachers can help prepare students to be good stewards of wild and domestic animals without taking on the responsibility of a cat or dog. For wild animals, kids can help fill bird feeders, plant flowers for pollinating insects, or hang bat houses. On the most basic level, little ones can practice their pouring skills with small bags of bird seed. On a deeper level, it can lead to conversations about animals’ needs (food, shelter) and larger ecological roles. Classrooms usually can’t have cats or dogs, but many can have lizards, hamsters, butterflies, or fish. As part of the class’s daily activities, children can feed the animals, play with them, and even help clean their cages. To build awareness of the skills needed for keeping more demanding pets, students could take care of toy cats or dogs, play-acting feeding and brushing them. Kids themselves love to pretend they are pets, which also helps them build empathy for animals and think about how they may see the world differently from humans.

Recycling and composting: Recycling and composting provide tons of great opportunities to build sorting skills as well as lead into bigger thematic conversations. Depending on your community’s recycling set-up, you may be separating garbage into paper, plastic, metal and trash, or if it’s single stream like ours, just recyclable and non-recyclable. Adding composting to the mix makes it even more complicated, with produce scraps able to go into it, but no other food scraps. If you do your own composting, you can also explain how you need to balance the food scraps with dry input like newspapers. These activities can lead into conversations about how much we throw away and what happens to it, how that affects other people and how we can reduce our waste. With older kids, composting is a great opportunity to talk about decomposers, soil chemistry, and their role in ecology.

Bike maintenance: This is one I could use a better handle on myself. When I pulled my personal bike out for the first time this spring, Sprout was fascinated by it. I showed him how I pumped up my tires and had him help by pushing down on the handle. Every kid who has a bike should at least be able check their bike ABCs before each ride – Air in the tires, Brakes working, and Chain running well. In an ideal world, they should also know how to place a jumped chain back on and fix a flat tire, although those are both fairly challenging. These skills build both fine and gross motor skills, along with problem solving skills. While preschoolers and even most elementary school kids won’t bike alone, having these skills does make biking possible as a form of transportation for kids, far earlier than they can drive.

These are just a few of the practical skills that I think we should be teaching all kids, especially in the Montessori curriculum with its focus on “real life” learning.

What practical life skills do you want to teach your young kid or do you wish you were taught when you were a child?

Reintroducing the Bike to a Toddler

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 3 Comments

Most of the time, when I do a bike ride, my training is the most important aspect. But when I’m bringing along a small passenger, I need his willing participation as well. For the upcoming Tour de Cookie, I was quite concerned that Sprout was not going to buy into my plan. Fortunately, after pulling my bike out of the shed for the first time this spring for a ride with him, I’m much more confident that we’ll all have a good time.

While I rode with Sprout a number of times last year, he was never fond of it. Although he was big enough to be in the trailer, he wasn’t tall enough to see well out of the windows. He was also much more adverse to risk than he is now, making the bumps rather disconcerting to him. To make it worse, he absolutely hated hats, especially his bike helmet. He would whine, yell, and try to pull it off to no avail. He smiled all of once when I put him in the trailer last year. He usually fell asleep, looking uncomfortable with his head on his chest. I probably would have skipped riding with him altogether if I hadn’t been leading the Rockville Kidical Mass rides. You can’t really lead a ride for families with young kids without your young child with you.

This year already seemed more promising even before we got on the bike. Sprout’s nearly twice as old as he was last spring. Since the ride in November, his demeanor and understanding of what’s going on has evolved considerably. He can now use words to tell me what’s wrong, follow social cues, understand simple explanations, and predict what will happen next. All of these characteristics made me think he might have a much more pleasant, less disorienting biking experience now than he did then.

Even better, he now knows what a bike is and can say the word. There are bikes in a number of his books, including Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things that Go. He loves pointing them out with a proud, “Bike!” On the way home from the playground, he always stops at the Capital Bikeshare stand to spin the pedals.

A few days before our first ride, I introduced the idea of my bike and trailer to him. I hooked up my pump to my tires and encouraged him to “help” me pump by pushing down on the handle. He wanted to poke at everything, so I let him spin my bike’s pedals and touch the tires. I tried to keep his little hands away from the gears, the many sharp or pointy components, and the greasy chain. Unfortunately, I was only partly successful in that last effort. When I took the tarp off of the trailer, his first instinct was to climb inside.

For our first ride of the season, I got home early on a pleasantly warm day. Unfortunately, the sky had turned from blue and calm to gray and windy during the day, so I limited our ride to less than 2 miles. Although it was going to be far less than the 15 mile Tour de Cookie (plus a few miles each way to get back and forth from the start), I figured it was better to get something in than nothing.

For starters, Sprout seemed much less upset about his helmet than he had been in the past. It fit him better (his head has grown), he’s taken a fondness to hats after reading Jan Brett’s The Hat, and he’s been interested in my helmet for a while. I explained, “You get to wear a bike hat like mommy!”, which seemed to help. While there was a little bit of whinage, it wasn’t a National Emergency the way so many things in toddlerdom are.

When Chris helped me put Sprout in the trailer, he looked around and actually smiled! He seemed eager to find out what was going to happen. (He’s young enough that he has no memory of last year’s experiences.) He was a little startled when we started to move, but he quickly caught on, leaning forward and giving me a running commentary of our surroundings. I heard a little chorus of “Car! Car! Car!” every time we passed a parked car. I explained how this was like the horse and cart (or zebra and carriage or elephant and bandstand) in To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry St., except I was the beast of burden and he was the passenger. After reading all of these transportation books and walking around himself, I suspect he has a much deeper appreciation as to what is involved in pulling him around. He actually liked it so much that he cried when I put the tarp over the trailer when we were done.

Besides enjoying the ride, Sprout had a much different reaction than when he’s in the car. I’m not sure if it’s that he can’t see much or it’s the vibration, but for short car trips, he goes into a really quiet, meditative-like state. He genuinely doesn’t seem interested in interacting, even if you try. In contrast, he was very engaged in the trailer, talking to me even though I had a hard time hearing him. I love that even though the trailer is more isolated than a kid’s bike seat, he was still getting some of the benefits of the biking experience.

To top it all off, I was reassured that pulling the trailer didn’t feel that bad. While it weighs a lot more than my normal bike, it didn’t feel that much worse than riding a Bikeshare, which I use almost daily.

Overall, I’m very positive about our chances for having a good time doing the Tour de Cookie. I can always ply him with cookies, and if all else fails, Chris will have the car.

Teething Bites

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 2 Comments

Text: "Teething Bites / We'll Eat You Up, We Love You So" Picture: Cartoon shark holding up a fin

The scourge of teething has darkened our door once again. And if that sounds overdramatic, let me assure you that it is not at all.

Sprout started teething quite early, around five months. He showed all of the classical signs: drooling like a waterfall, chomping on his hands, and slight stomach crud. Every day, we would check to see if there was any progress made, if those little white bumps were any closer to poking through. We applied Ora-gel religiously, hoping to find a way to help him sleep better.

Unfortunately, it was more than two months until we saw the first tooth emerge. The others took their sweet time as well, sprouting from his gums like the world’s slowest, hardest seedlings. While there was some pain, especially just before they poked through, it didn’t affect his mood too badly. He was a little cranky here and there, but nothing vastly out of the ordinary.

Much to our relief, there was a brief reprieve.

Then came the molars.

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Starting Seeds with Sprout

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 5 Comments

Kids and dirt are natural companions. But while most moms discourage their toddlers from getting dirty, I purposely gave my kid a big bowl of dirt a few days ago. And over a white carpet, no less. The things I do in the name of permaculture and teaching my son about my passions.

The actual purpose of this disaster-in-the-making was to start seeds for my vegetable garden. I’ve been starting seeds for my garden for several years now and even started saving seeds myself. This year, I had tomato seeds and sweet potato starts saved from my garden as well as pepper, cantelope, and butternut squash seeds from vegetables purchased at the farmer’s market. The rest I bought from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, which in addition to carrying organic, heirloom and regionally-developed seeds, has a lovely catalog with hand-drawn illustrations and stories about the selections.

While I could have planted my seeds by myself, I want to involve Sprout as much as possible in my gardening. Teaching children how to garden increases the likelihood of enjoying vegetables, gets them outside with all of the sensory benefits that involves, helps them feel more like they contribute to the larger household, and teaches them the valuable skill of growing food. Plus, gardening has taught me to be a better parent.

You can also use gardening to teach all sorts of academic skills, including math (counting seeds and measuring distances between plantings), biology (the growth of a plant), and social studies (where we get our food). Personally, I see it as an opportunity to teach ecological principles. In my garden, I practice permaculture, which focuses on working within ecological systems in ways that produce goods for people such as food. Through lasagna composting or gardening, where you layer several levels of organic matter together like leaf litter in a forest, I can demonstrate the importance of decomposition. With cover crops like clover or hairy vetch, I can show him on a practical level how nitrogen fixing works and why it’s essential to the ecosystem. Planting flowers that attract bees and butterflies can demonstrate how pollinators rely on plants and vice versa.

But as he doesn’t understand higher-level concepts yet, we’re mainly working on our fine motor skills. I started our gardening adventure with a big bowl of wet seed starting base. To prepare, I took my old seed starting pots – recycled yogurt containers with holes punched in the bottom – and sprayed them down with a bleach solution, then rinsed them in water. Because new sprouts are extremely vulnerable to mold, you have to minimize potential contamination if you plan to use them in the garden. It’s like sanitizing a newborn’s bottles. Then, I took the seed starting mixture from the garden store and soaked it in water. The soil needs to be thoroughly damp for starting seeds and I find it a lot easier to do that before planting the seeds rather than afterwards. Whenever I’ve done it afterwards I’ve ended up drowning them.

As I set this whole rigamarole up, Chris was giving me a bit of the stink-eye. Not that he didn’t want Sprout to participate in gardening, but he was highly skeptical of my confidence in containing the mess. I would have preferred to do this task outside as well, but as the temperatures were topping out in the teens, that wasn’t an option. As I laid out paper towels, I hoped my hope was more well-founded than his skepticism.

With my containers, starter, seeds, and masking tape for labeling, we startd the work of planting. Sprout’s main task was to move seed starting mix from a big bowl into the individual containers. With a bit of explanation and demonstration, he understood quite quickly. It must have tapped into toddlers’ love of moving stuff from one container to another. Tackling the job with gusto, he stuck his little hand in the giant bowl fully of mud and grabbed what he could. Picking up a small clump at a time, he shifted it from one container to the other with relatively little leakage. And he never purposely threw dirt.

After we filled a container up 3/4 of the way, I took several seeds and spaced them out around the top. Sprout then sprinkled a few more bits of dirt on top, which I smoothed out with my hand, making sure all of the seeds were covered but too deep. He actually was working so fast that I had to tell him to slow down so we didn’t bury the seeds by mistake. Then we handed it off to Chris, who wiped down the container and labeled it with the plant name.

As quickly as it started, it was over, with six containers of seeds to show for it. There was a lot of dirt on his crafts table, some on the mat underneath, and a little bit on the carpet. Most of the dirt that ended up on the floor was because he brushed it off the seat of his table in a mistaken but well-intentioned attempt to keep things neat. The main loss was the majority of a packet of tiny basil seeds that Sprout had mistakenly dumped. They were so hopelessly mixed in with dirt that retrieving them was impossible.

For his help, I gave Sprout a special present later in the day – the book Growing Vegetable Soup. Written and illustrated by Lois Elhart, who illustrated Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, it describes the process of vegetable gardening from start to finish, complete with comprehensive labels for every tool and veggie. I saw the book back when I was shopping for Christmas and decided I would put it aside until we actually started the gardening process. While he probably doesn’t understand the steps yet, I hope reading the book over and over again will improve his comprehension of what’s going on by this summer.

As we move forward, I’ll keep him in the loop of caring for the plants. According to my gardening book, “petting” seedlings makes them stronger, so that will be his job if he can be gentle enough. He also loves turning lights on and off, so I’ll let him pull the chain for the grow lights.

Starting seeds shares some elements of parenting a toddler: the mix of unpredictability, anticipation and potential for the future. It’s also taking a bit of a stand for hope as this brutally cold winter drags on. It reminds yourself that yes, I do believe that one day the warmth will return. It’s these little symbols that get us through the tough times – the image of one tiny seed, nurtured by love and water, eventually producing a wealth of delicious vegetables.

Play with Your Food!

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 1 Comment

In high school, my husband was the slowest eater I had ever met. Although his future as a professional cook seems like a surprising turn of events, I often comment that they actually had something very important in common – Chris playing with his food. While that observation is half-joke, we both like to think of cooking as play instead of a chore. We want Sprout to enjoy cooking healthy, delicious, sustainable meals as he grows older rather than merely tolerating it. With this in mind, we gave him a toy kitchen and food for Christmas. What we didn’t realize is how many real-life skills we could teach him as a result.

I spent a lot of time researching and considering the options for toy kitchens before I made my final decision. I wanted one that was sturdy, gender-neutral (along with the pink drenched options, there are also ones designed to be acceptable to “manly” dads), had a lot of different play options and looked somewhat realistic.

What I like about the one I bought is that it functions in many ways like a real kitchen. There’s a “cutting board” and sufficient counter space (with “granite” countertops!) for preparation, which a surprising number of toy kitchens lack. It has a knife block with tiny chefs’ knives so we can discuss the proper storage of kitchen cutlery with him. It has a little sink that you can pretend to fill up a pasta pot or (ugh) wash dishes. It came with different types of pots and pans, allowing you to match the right kind of dishware with cooking techniques, whether that’s boiling water in a pot or searing a burger in a pan. To help Sprout learn good safety techniques, I cut apart an old dish-rag so he can use little towels to take items out of the oven. The kitchen even comes with little baskets that you to collect and empty “food waste” into the invisible compost bucket.

Our son's toy kitchen!

Unlike most toy kitchens, this one even has “food waste,” even though it’s non-compostable plastic. In addition to the hamburger and hot dog that came with the kitchen, I bought my little (sometimes) veggie-lover a basket of toy produce that requires preparation. You can peel and section the orange, cut the tomato, peel the banana, cut the cauliflower, and shuck the corn. All of the pieces are held together with Velcro, so they’re easy to put back together. What’s really neat about it is that you can introduce actual knife techniques with them. Pushing down on most play food with a play knife usually causes it to slip and cause what would be a nasty gouge in real life. In contrast, this set rewards good knife skills – cutting with the curved “sharp” side is much easier than the straight, “blunt” side. The toy food also allows us to teach him safety skills, like choking up on the knife to improve control and curling under the fingers on his holding hand so you don’t slice them. While he’s far from that level of comprehension, it’s absurdly cute for now to watch him “cut” through fake vegetables with his little plastic chef’s knife.

To further practice his skills, we recently allowed him to help us prepare a snack. A few months ago, we found a recipe for Chocolate Almond Date Energy Balls, which we found were both delicious and semi-healthy. We originally found the recipe on Sweet Happy Life, but because she’s taken down her blog archives to protect her kid’s privacy, I’m going to share our version (slightly modified from hers) here.
 
Chocolate date almond energy balls

Based on an original recipe from Sweet Happy Life (Ariela Pelaia)

Ingredients
1 cup whole, raw almonds
3 tablespoons chocolate chips
1 cup dates (can often get from the bulk section in natural foods stores)
¼ teaspoon vanilla extract
¼ cup almond butter
1 to 3 tablespoons water
4-5 tbs shredded coconut

Instructions
Using a food processor, grind the almonds, chocolate chips, dates, vanilla and almond butter, until it the combination creates large chunks that separate out from each other. If needed, add water slowly until it reaches that consistency. Pinch off a good-size chunk and roll into a ball with your hands. Roll each of the balls in the shredded coconut. Eat immediately (although they’ll be a little sticky) or refrigerate.

The first time we made the Energy Balls with Sprout, he was very engaged and enjoyed sprinkling coconut over the balls. This time, he was a little more distracted. He didn’t really want to form the balls and seemed more interested in pushing the coconut off of the plate than anything else. Oh well. We’ll keep trying to teach him to play with his food.

Standing in the Bath…Thinking

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 3 Comments

A few months ago, Sprout decided he would no longer sit in the tub. Needless to say, this was not a decision that Chris and I welcomed. In fact, it was extremely frustrating. Besides making him much more difficult to wash, it was straight-up dangerous. I had to hold firmly on to his arm throughout the entire bath to prevent him from walking or randomly slipping. What was one of my favorite parts of the night became this weird power struggle between us for six whole weeks.

On the surface, this was the first real instance of him pushing limits and testing boundaries. While we’ve always had issues with sleep and he was a picky eater for a while, this was really out of nowhere and not a typical toddler behavior. It seemed one day, he thought, “What would happen if I stood up in the tub?” and then didn’t stop. It was so arbitrary.

At first, we had no idea how to react. I’m against using physical force for compliance in all but the most dangerous of situations, like yanking a kid out of the way of a car. Also, whenever we tried any physical encouragement, like putting gentle pressure on his shoulder or lifting his legs up to encourage him to sit, he squirmed violently. Our cues only increased the danger of the situation. There wasn’t a clear role for punishment, as it isn’t useful for kids that little, especially if it isn’t obviously and clearly connected to the problem. Trying a more positive tack, we praised the wonders of sitting, like being able to play with his toys. But he didn’t seem to care one bit. So we weren’t left with a lot of options.

We finally settled on allowing the natural, uncomfortable consequences of standing in the bathtub to play out on their own. Through no to little action of ours, he was choosing to be cold and have a short, boring bath. He couldn’t play with his toys or splash. I wanted to minimize the time spent in this risky situation, so I washed him as quickly as possible, leaving out the fun interaction we used to have. The one thing we purposely took away was the time we normally spend playing on the bed after his bath while I dry him off. I didn’t want to make it seem like a reward for standing. Plus, when I was that frustrated, I didn’t really feel like singing or playing.

While this seemed to be the best course of action, I felt like I was missing something. Sprout clearly didn’t enjoy his baths anymore – he looked stoic most of the time – but he still wouldn’t sit down. Was this a case of exceptional toddler stubbornness or something else?

I hit upon what that “something else” might be one day when Chris was showering. Since our Disney World vacation, Sprout has been into imitating the “big people.” I guessed that one of the times Chris stuck his head out of the shower to talk to Sprout, he got the idea that big people don’t sit in the bath – they stand. It wasn’t that he was adamantly against sitting in the tub in and of itself, but against doing something for babies.

To prove to him that adults do, in fact, take baths, we actually had Chris take a bath with him. It was pretty cramped – Chris is tall and our tub is not – but it worked! When I put him in with Chris, Sprout was skeptical, but eventually sat down. Since then, he’s stayed sitting when I put him in the tub and hasn’t expressed any great interest in standing up.

I feel a little guilty that he was uncomfortable for so long before I hit upon an alternative explanation. But on the other hand, I don’t know if he would have acquiesced if Chris had demonstrated the first night. Maybe he had to experience how unpleasant the alternative to sitting was before mAking that choice. But it did illustrate once again to me how different his perspective is from mine and how difficult that can be to express when you have very few language skills. It made it clear how all the more important it is for me to truly listen to him, even if his communication isn’t always in words.

The Night We Finally Did Cry-it-Out

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 4 Comments

So far, this winter has been absolutely bonkers. Coming off of hosting Thanksgiving for both sets of parents, we drove to Pittsburgh for my work, and then the week after, I was off to Denver on another work trip. In between, we had two kids’ birthday parties and a puppet show. Needless to say, this seriously messed with Sprout’s schedule and head. Unfortunately, it had the worst consequences at night.

In September, I truly believed our sleep problems had come and gone. After the chaotic schedule that was our vacation, we had settled into a regular rhythm. We had one tough week where I would let him cry for five or six minutes at night, go in his room, hug him for a few minutes, put him down, and repeat until he fell asleep. But once that week ended, he’d curl up in bed clutching his stuffed Figment and sleep through until the morning.

Then came the molars. Known as the most painful, unpleasant of all teething, the resulting headaches prevented him from falling asleep on his own. When the Oragel wore off four hours after his bedtime – always around my bedtime – he would wake up screaming. Hating that my baby was in pain, I’d pick him up and cradle him on the big chair in his room.

Of course, now that I had broken the routine (again), I was doomed to repeat history. Even when his teeth weren’t bothering him, he’d wail like a banshee when I tried to put him in his crib. I tried the “every five minutes” tactic, but he just got angrier each time. I’d finally acquiesce, settling down in the chair so he could fall asleep on my lap. In the middle of the night, he would wake up and expect me to hold him on my lap, just like at bedtime. Waking up once a night soon turned into waking up twice and soon enough we were back to the hellish schedule we had months ago.

I tried different tactics to varying degrees of success. We slept on the couch, which worked once. One night, I brought him into our bed. That worked twice before he decided it was more fun to crawl on our heads than sleep between us. Unlike kids that just want a parent in close proximity, he specifically wanted me to hold him in my arms sitting up. (It seems like Lydia over at Rants from Mommyland had the same problem.) Despite the absurdity, I was willing to put up with it until December’s chaos was done. We would start over in January.

Then I left on my Denver trip and it really went to hell. Sprout was very unhappy about daddy putting him to bed, even with my mom visiting as back-up. One night, he woke up at 3 AM and screamed whenever they tried to put him down – for more than two whole hours. Unfortunately, my return didn’t improve the situation. One weekday, I had to go to the office the next morning after being up in the middle of the night for two hours.

At that point, Chris declared the situation unsustainable and unacceptable. Sprout was no longer an infant. He had the capability to fall asleep independently – he had previously and still did during naptime. He even had some comprehension of other people’s needs and the fact that we need to avoid hurting people. We needed to set some boundaries and teach him that mommy is not his personal pillow.

Unfortunately, we only saw one choice – cry-it-out. While variations on the Sleep Lady technique had worked previously, they just pissed him off now. If possible, we wanted to avoid him degenerating into angry rabid honey badger mode. He would certainly be angry if we ignored him, but at least he wouldn’t think we were taunting him.

I hate, hate, hate the idea of cry-it-out. I had sworn that I would never, ever do that to my child. That I couldn’t possibly listen to him cry like he was in pain. That I wouldn’t let him stand there like an abandoned orphan.

But then I did – and it was terrible.

Even though I could hear him through our walls, I still kept the monitor on at night. I cringed at every cry. I wept into my pillow, asking Chris, “Why are we doing this? He’s scared, he’s sad, he’s lonely!” He’d reassure me that we were doing the right thing, we had tried everything else, Sprout was choosing not to sleep and he was just throwing a major hissy fit. Most importantly, he told me that Sprout still loved me and that I loved him.

The first few nights were the worst, with him yelling on and off for more than an hour at times. All of us were strung out on sleeplessness and stress. It took about a week – with part of it away from our house – before we restored our previous status. The first night he went down with minimal fussing, I released a huge breath. The worst was over and we would all be the better for it.

Every night is a new challenge, a new opportunity. I know there are some nights he’ll still wake up. Once he’s consistently sleeping through the night, I’ll go in to comfort him without making a routine of it. Once he switches to a toddler bed, I can definitely see him climbing into our queen-sized bed and squishing us. But I am never ever using that chair as a bed again.

A Day at the Museum

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 6 Comments

The New York State Museum in Albany was one of my favorite places as a child. Despite the fact that my mom is a teacher and deeply devoted to education, I dragged her there so many times that even she started getting sick of it. While it’s far from a world-class museum, it has a lovely diversity of exhibits, including large dioramas of taxidermied animals, rock and minerals displays, histories of New York’s Native American tribes, and a tribute to New York City. So when my mom suggested bringing Sprout there over Christmas break, I thought it was worth checking it. Even though he’s was too young to read the placards, we thought he would enjoy looking at the exhibits.

We headed to Albany on Monday morning, walking to the Museum through the huge underground Concourse. I pointed out to Sprout the huge abstract art covering the walls, thinking he would like the giant multi-colored snake and interlocking black and white shapes. However, he was more interested in the noisy construction equipment than looking at modern art. When we finally arrived at the museum’s front doors, we discovered that the exhibits are closed on Mondays. While we considered detouring to a different museum, we ditched the entire thing and headed home.

The day after Christmas, we decided to give the New York State Museum another try after a play date with one of my mom’s friends’ kids was canceled. This time, they were actually open.

We started off with the Adirondack exhibit. Sprout was fascinated by the majestic stuffed elk in front of a running waterfall, although I couldn’t tell if it was the animal, the water, or the coins in the pool that kept his attention. We spent about 10 minutes looking at that single display and he still kept trying to go back when we tried to leave. However, not all of the animals were nearly that popular. Looking skeptically at both the moose and the mastadon, he wouldn’t get too close, wary of their size.

On our way out of the Adirondacks section, we came upon the Children’s Discovery Center, which I had forgotten about. When I was a kid, it was filled with computers that allowed you to play Odell Lake (a game where you played a fish trying not to get eaten) and other vaguely educational games. When hardly anyone had a home computer, those black and green screens were the height of excitement. As many kids now have their own iPads, the Center has since gone in the opposite direction. Everything was touchy-feely, with the only screens being those showing a microscope close-up of insect mouthparts. Like our local nature center, they had animal furs, skins, bones, and fossils to touch.

They also had a small collection of wooden puzzles, animal puppets, and dress-up costumes. Playing with one of the puzzles, Sprout brought one piece over to the middle of the floor, near another, slightly older boy. The boy must have been playing with the same puzzle earlier, as he immediately shouted, “Mine!” in typical toddler fashion. While the little boy’s dad was in the middle of telling him that he had to share, Sprout did something surprising. He went back to the puzzle across the room and brought back a different piece for the boy to play with. When the kid kept whining, he brought over the entire puzzle to share. It was such a kind gesture; I was so proud of him for being generous when he didn’t have to be.

Next up was one of my favorite sections of the Museum – the area on the Iroquois Native American confederacy. While these days it looked out-of-date and probably had some level of cultural insensitivity (I didn’t have time to read the placards), at one point, it did spark my interest about a culture very different from my own. The heart of the exhibit is a large replica of a longhouse. While visitors can walk through much of it, the end of it is blocked off and has a diorama of people listening to a story around a fire. With its poor lighting and audio narration, entering that longhouse felt a little like stepping back in time to me. Creeping into it slowly, afraid yet still very interested, I think Sprout understood a little of that feeling. As we left, I explained to him that descendants of these people are still around and continue to use some of the costumes for ceremonies. While I know he didn’t understand my explanation, but it was important for me to say it anyway. I want him both to know about the history of a variety of ethnic groups as well as understand that history is more than just a story in a book – that these people still exist today and the events of the past reverberate through our modern day.

Next up was the New York City exhibit, which was a bit of a mixed bag. He loved the subway car parked in the middle of the floor, giggling as he ran in and out of it. Although we’ve been on the D.C. Metro many times, he clearly didn’t make that connection that they were the same thing. Obviously, we haven’t made the jump from generic “train” to “subway” yet. He was pretty indifferent about the Sesame Street display, only interested by the historical clips they were playing on a dinky TV. He could have cared less about Oscar the Grouch being there in person. For obvious reasons, we skipped the September 11 exhibit and finished off with a walk through the room of historical fire trucks. As he took in the 20 pieces or so of huge shiny fire equipment, his eyes went wide. While many of them were both practical and decorative, a silver one that could have been Cinderella’s carriage was actually used only in parades.

We wrapped up our trip with a ride on the museum’s historic, restored carousel. While not as bright or elaborate as some, its horses were truly lovely. Although we’ve been in carousels elsewhere, Sprout had clearly forgotten those experiences, because his mouth dropped when his horse moved upwards. As the ride spun faster and faster, he gazed at the cranks spinning round and round that move the horses up-and-down. I definitely knew he enjoyed it when as soon as it stopped, whiny grousing commenced. Fortunately, we had a built-in reason we couldn’t repeat the ride – the carousel is so fragile that they only run it every 15 minutes, saving both the historical landmark and parents’ sanity.

Reflecting on our day, I realize how drastically different my experience was before and after having a child. I used to read every placard, trying to imprint the information into my brain. This time, I had neither the luxury of time or focus to do more than skim them. Previously, I meandered from exhibit to exhibit, lingering on those I found particularly interesting. Now, I followed Sprout from place to place, letting him take the lead.

This is not to say that we’ll stop visiting everything but kid-oriented museums. In particular, I know the New York State Museum so well that there was nothing I would have gained from a close reading. There’s still plenty of places that I’ll want to do more than skim and I believe it’s important to show him we love to learn as well.

But it does mean that the way I approach museums – even the most beloved of them – will radically change. And that’s quite alright with me – seeing my inquisitive little boy learning right beside me brings new meaning to the whole experience.

The Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh: Won’t You Be My Visitor?

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 7 Comments

I am a huge museum nerd. As a kid,
one of my favorite destinations was the New York State Museum. When I travel, I usually visit multiple museums at a location. So I was very excited to introduce Sprout to his first museum experience. While we had brought him to art museums before, they were much more for our enjoyment than his. Even though we live in the museum capital of the world, they’re all designed for folks much bigger than him. As it turned out, having first real museum experience at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh was just right.

Pittsburgh has never struck me as a tourist destination, but I had to go there for work anyway. As I’m also traveling this week, Chris and Sprout came with me so I wasn’t absent for two weeks in a row. As it turns out, Pittsburgh actually has a wealth of cool, unique museums, all of which are very different in form and function from the Smithsonians.

I’ve been to a number of children’s museums, but Pittsburgh’s was easily one of, if not the best, I’ve ever visited.

One of the things that really set it apart was its focus on integrating art into the play space. For example, it had a whole exhibit called Tough Art, a series of pieces designed for children to touch and interact with. One piece was a metallic moon with stars that played different musical tones if you touched the moon and one of the stars at the same time. At first, it seemed like the same person needed to touch the moon and the stars to get it to work. But much to my delight, we realized that wasn’t quite right – multiple people could make the elements sing, but they had to be touching each other for the harmonic resonance to vibrate through their bodies. Holding hands, Chris, Sprout and I had a blast, working together to reach the furthest star. Another part of the exhibit was a series of white poles with colored spotlights that refracted off them, making your shadow shift between multiple colors as you moved. I don’t think Sprout noticed the colors, but we loved watching the rainbow of light as he ran loops around the poles.

Art was integrated into the regular exhibits as well. The Waterworks floor, which had water tools and toys for kids to experiment with, includes a piece simply called Rain Shower. Even the toddler area had visually sophisticated art as decorations, with stained glass pieces giving the area a fairy-tale feel.

Besides being interactive, the museum’s approach to art had two more unique facets – its invitation to children to think about the art as well as create their own. Many of the pieces had captions, just like in a regular art museum, but at a kid’s literacy level without being over-simplified. In the Makespace, kids can use sophisticated tools they may not have access to otherwise to create objects that meet at the junction of art and science. We didn’t visit that section because Sprout was too little, but I look forward to it when we visit in the future.

The other exemplary aspect of the museum is how it managed to have activities that were appropriate for, appealing to, and respectful of a variety of ages. For example, Sprout’s two favorite exhibits were a giant Lite-Brite board and a machine inspired by the bounce pattern of a Superball. For him, the Lite Brite board was awesome because not only did it involve sticking pegs in and out of holes, but the pegs glowed when you put them in! For me as an adult, it was still fun to arrange the pegs into different space-agey patterns. The Superball demonstration had a series of balls on poles that dropped in a wave when you pulled a lever. Sprout loved pushing the balls in place, pulling the lever (which he figured out from watching the museum guide) and watching the balls fall, bouncing up and down. He actually worked quite hard to push the balls into place – the only reason we helped was because we lacked the patience to wait! As he got older, I could see this exhibit still being interesting, for the way it illustrates the pattern of a wave.

Much of this understanding of and respect for children’s needs stems from the museum’s patron saint – Fred Rogers, who was a major influence in its founding and design. While he’s gone, his spirit very much remains in the museum’s special appreciation of children. Sprout had a wonderful time and was especially engaged by some specific exhibits. While would have liked to stayed longer, I was so glad we were able to introduce him to the joys of museums through the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh.