Monkeys! Things I Learned from Watching Disney’s Monkey Kingdom

April 30, 2015 / Shannon Brescher Shea / 1 Comment

This past weekend, we brought Sprout to his first movie in a theater. It was in the mid-60s and predicted to rain, but I also wanted to get out of the house. It was just the right day for going to the movies. While there are few movies I would show him at this age, we were in luck. Last week, Disney released the latest in their Earth Day Disney Nature series – Monkey Kingdom. I figured if there was any movie that would hold his attention, it was this one. Besides, we were fully prepared to leave the theater if he got too antsy. As he was enthralled for the first 45 minutes, we all got to pay close attention to that section. Here are a few things I learned while watching:

My kid really likes monkeys.
I already knew this one, but I couldn’t predict exactly how many times he would say the word “monkey!” during the movie. At least 30 or 40, although I wasn’t counting. Thankfully, there were only about 10 other people in the theater, none of them sitting close to us. Chris said there was another kid with running commentary as well, although I didn’t hear them. It helped that the the sound was really loud.

The city the movie is set in is real and looks awesome.
The movie focuses on a group of monkeys in Polonnaruwa, an abandoned ancient city in Sri Lanka. The scenery is spectacular, with monkeys swinging from natural rock formations, giant trees, and intricately carved buildings. The coolest part is that Polonnaruwa is a real place, designated as a UNESCO Cultural Heritage site. The movie doesn’t even show some of the most striking statues, intricately carved and full of evocative details in their clothes and headdresses. I’ll probably never get to visit, but damn, the Wikipedia article alone made me want to.

Macaque monkeys provide a great illustration of privilege.
The movie focuses on Maya, a lower-class macaque monkey. Macaques have a very specific, strict and regimented social structure. The top monkeys – the alpha male and his primary females – get the best food, sleeping places, and protection from predators. Because class position is inherited, their kids are extremely privileged as well. They get to climb all over the lower-class adult monkeys, even when they’re trying to sleep. Whether they want to or not, the low-class monkeys are forced to be defacto babysitters for the royalty. The movie’s explanation of the system was a great elementary description of privilege that I think could spark some really interesting conversations with older kids. (Especially if you ignored the rest of the plot. More on that later.)

By Kalyan Varma GFDL 1.2, GFDL or CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Baby macaques are seriously ugly-cute.
They’re super-wrinkly and almost completely bald except a little patch of old-man hair on the tops of their heads. Only other monkeys and people who think naked mole rats are cute could think baby macaques are.

Disney’s dislike of non-conventionally attractive people extends to monkeys as well.
Except for the babies – which obviously get a pass – every monkey with a disfigurement or a striking facial feature was a villain. Props to Chris for pointing this out. He also made the valid point that much of the “showdown” between the two monkey tribes was just the result of clever editing. The scarred monkey that was presented as the head of the warring tribe was probably from the same group as the heroine.

Nature documentaries are a great way to teach media awareness.
I remember being absolutely shocked the first time I realized nature documentaries are often staged. I maintained my naïveté about that particular subject for a pathetically long time – at least until high school. And those were “Planet Earth” type of movies, with straight-forward facts over vibrant, amazing images. “Documentaries” like Monkey Kingdom that have a plot and specific characters require the filmmakers to play even faster and looser with “what really happens in the wild.” One part of the movie claims that a number of traumatic events happen to our protagonist in a single day, when it probably took months to shoot. Similarly, some people have suggested that the main character and her “love interest” are never on screen simultaneously, their romance a result of clever editing. While Sprout isn’t old enough, discussing how nature filmmakers can use selected footage and editing to create or suggest events that never happened is an excellent lead-in to broader discussions into how the media does or doesn’t cover news. The idea that the media can distort the news or leave out major parts is challenging to consider, but nature documentaries offer a fuzzy and gentle introduction.

Disney seriously made a film about monkeys into a princess movie.
A key part of media awareness is being able to read the unsaid or implied messages in a story. Disney’s message in Monkey Kingdom – and I am not exagurrating at all – is that if you are poor, you can wait for your Prince Charming to come and overthrow the king. Seriously. The low-born monkey has a love interest come in from another group, the love interest takes over after the monkey King loses his position during a conflict, and Maya, her baby, and her monkey prince live happily ever after. Tina Fey does a good job narrating and the story is cute, but also pretty inane. Fortunately, the imagery and footage was so engaging that it was easy to forgive the silliness.

If you’re a toddler, movie theater seats are really fun.
The movie was so engaging that Sprout was captivated for a good 45 minutes – about 2/3 of the running time. After that point, he wanted to move around a little. As he clambered off my lap, I let him sit in the seat next to me. Not being a toddler myself, I underestimated both how little he would be in comparison to the giant seat and how much he could move the it up and down with his body weight. Thankfully, this new diversion was both quiet and pretty darn entertaining for him.

Letting a toddler walk up or down stairs in a movie theater in the dark is a terrible idea.
Unfortunately, playing on the movie theater seat didn’t last the entire movie. No, his next task to conquer was crawling up the stairs. Again, I figured it was quiet and relatively harmless. I parked myself on the stairs and planned to give chase if he went too far. Unfortunately, he didn’t get far at all. As he pulled himself up the third step and I glanced at the screen, I heard a wail. He had slipped, crumpled in a toddler-shaped pile. I scooped him up and hustled outside, trying to minimize both his pain and everyone else’s exposure to it. After a few minutes of calming down, we went back into the theater. Then, because I’m a brilliant, forward-thinking mom, I let him try to walk down the stairs. Of course, he fell again. Thankfully, it wasn’t as hard and the movie was pretty much over anyway.

What was the first movie in a theater you brought your kid to or that you remember as a kid? How did it go?

Baltimore, White Privilege and Who I’m Really Worried For

April 28, 2015October 17, 2022 / Shannon Brescher Shea / 10 Comments

Trigger warning: Racism, police violence, children in harmful situations

With the conflict coming to a head in Baltimore, a few people that know we live in Maryland have asked if we’re all right. Fortunately, we live nearly an hour away from the affected area. But all of the recent protests, stories of injustice, and tragedies have inspired a lot of thought in my mind, especially because we live in a historically African-American neighborhood. These stories have brought into relief both how much I don’t experience due to white privilege and my concerns for families other than my own.

Until the last few years, I wouldn’t have said I had white privilege. Class privilege, certainly – I knew I had loads of unearned advantages by being born into an educated, upper-middle class family. But racial privilege? Nah – I had black friends who seemed just as well off as I was. That was all solved with the Civil Rights movement, right?

Then I started reading, a dangerous action if you want to keep your misperceptions of the world. I read about how Lavar Burton – the host of Reading Rainbow! – had to teach his son to be submissive to the police. How a young man couldn’t bring a TV to his friend’s house in Dupont Circle for fear of being mistaken for a thief. How black women (and men) regularly have people touch their hair and bodies without asking. How the African-American community was barred for decades from purchasing houses by federal law. And of course, reading recently about the police brutality and exploitation against people of color in so many communities. In short, I started learning about how systems of oppression work, that class and race discrimination work both independently and hand-in-hand.

But it never quite got personal until I moved to my current neighborhood nearly five years ago. Early on – perhaps the first week I was here – I was walking to the Metro to a friend’s party in DC. I was bringing a six-pack of semi-expensive beer and forgot to grab a reusable bag. A few blocks in, one of my new neighbors spotted me and waved me over. They explained that I really needed to put the beer in a bag, as the police had a heavy presence in the neighborhood and would surely notice it. They kindly gave me a plastic bag to hide it. While I knew carrying a six-pack right in public was kind of gauche, I was pretty sure it wasn’t illegal and would have never considered getting police attention for it. The very idea that the police could reprimand – or worse, arrest me – for something tacky but legal, was both horrifying and incomprehensible.

Similarly, I was walking through my backyard in the early evening a few months later, when a cop yelled at me from his cruiser in the street. As I was just looking at the flower box on our shed, I was completely caught off guard. At first, I didn’t even acknowledge him, as I had no idea he was addressing me. He angrily demanded to know what I was doing there, while I struggled to explain that I was at my own house, still baffled as to what potential crime he was accusing me of. Apparently, he thought I was scoping out our shed to steal something, when I was just observing the sorry state of our flowers.

In both cases, I realized my shock was a huge sign of white privilege. Black people are uncomfortably used to having these interactions, driven by suspicion, on a regular basis. So many things I assumed – that I could peacefully walk down the street or in my own backyard – are assumptions people of color never have the luxury to make.

In the context of those experiences and the stories of so many, I don’t worry about my son and my family. I worry for the children in Baltimore who are missing their free lunches because school is closed and are instead watching their neighborhoods being taken over by martial law. I worry for the kids in hundreds of D.C. homeless families and the many risks they face, the potential of being lost forever to their parents like Relisha Rudd. I worry for the black and Hispanic kids in my neighborhood who go to the park alone, not worrying because their parents are neglectful (they aren’t), but because police have been calling Child Protective Services inappropriately in our county and they’re even less forgiving of people of color. I worry for the black kids in my church whose mom has to yell at them for running between the pews (after church) because she understandably wants them to respect places of authority. I worry that the submission to authority will become all too needed in their everyday lives.

So while I appreciate people’s concern, I ask for that concern to be turned elsewhere. If you want to help, the Baltimore Sun has a list of opportunities both for local volunteers and giving money to important community organizations. While education and books can’t stop systematic racism, libraries can offer vital community services and refuges for kids. The Ferguson, MO library accepts donations through their website. And of course, the NAACP has been working for racial equality and justice for decades.

One of Martin Luther King Jr’s less well-known quotes is: “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” If we care about justice, about equality, about vulnerable children, we too must demand that freedom for all.

An Open Letter to Kids Who are Bullied: How to Fight Back

April 24, 2015 / Shannon Brescher Shea / 5 Comments

I believe in being positive, especially as a parent, but sometimes I get frustrated. I get angry when people are being oppressed, when someone is reinforcing prejudicial societal patterns, or when people are putting others in unnecessary pain. These Open Letters are either to the people making me mad or those suffering.

Dear kids that are bullied,

I know how you feel. It was many years ago, but I still carry the mental scars – of having gum stuck in my hair, being told that I “needed a facial,” having my poetry notebook stolen repeatedly, having a boy send another girl to tell me that he would rather cut off his dick than go out with me. These memories still sting, ring in my ears when I look in the mirror. But I survived. And more importantly, I learned some hard-earned truths. While my son is too young to be bullied – and I hope he never is – I’ll share them with him if necessary. In the meantime, I hope can help some bullied kids – and maybe adults – today.

1) Know that you aren’t alone.
Bullying is a huge problem – more than 20% of kids report being bullied. Even if you don’t know it, the same people who are bullying you are probably bullying others too. Unfortunately, no one wants to admit to being bullied; society sees it as shameful. So we blame ourselves, even though we’re the victims. And even though adults don’t want to admit it, bullying is a problem way beyond schools. Bullying is an abuse of social power, plain and simple, and there’s way too much of it in our society. From police brutality to victim-blaming rape culture to institutional classism, we have a culture that condones and even promotes bullying. Knowing how to fight back against bullying is an invaluable life skill.

2) Ignore the well-meaning advice to “ignore bullies.”
This is bullshit. If bullies don’t get a reaction, they will not stop – they’ll just scale up their abuse until they do get a reaction. Instead of diffusing the situation, this tactic actually ends up escalating it. Plus, as anyone who has ever tried to ignore a bully knows, it’s incredibly hard to actually do so. Inevitably, you’ll give even the smallest reaction away, providing a foothold for them to dig into.

3) Find your people.
Many people say to go to an authority figure if you’re being bullied. This is not entirely bad advice, but it’s highly flawed. In many cases, the authority figure is on the side of the bully, either because the authority figure is a bully themselves or the bully has a high social status. In other cases, the authority figure wants to help, but can’t do much about it, especially if it’s psychological, not physical abuse.

Instead, I suggest making friends with everyone who will be friends with you – no matter what their social status. In school, it’s exceptionally tempting to make fun of the kids below you on the social ladder, in hopes that you’ll be seen as “cool” by kids higher up. This is utterly false. Bullies, of every type and age, want to divide and conquer; they want you isolated. Even if you could earn their respect, you shouldn’t want to. They are terrible people; you deserve better friends. One of the best things I did in junior high was befriend a couple of people who were even more outcast than I was. While I did it at first out of pity, it turned out that I needed their friendship as much as they needed mine. Unless you’re at a really small school, you can probably find at least a couple of other “weird kids” to hang out with. Don’t forget that you can be “just friends” with people of the opposite gender. Most of my high school friends were guys and I wish I had gotten to know them earlier. I’m actually still friends with most of them.

If there are a few adults you trust, you can bring them into that circle of support. It’s up to you to them about the bullying or not, but knowing there is someone you can talk to openly is incredibly valuable.

If you’re on the absolute bottom of the social ladder, try to find your tribe elsewhere. See if you can meet people in a club, like a gaming group, church youth group or non-school sport. If you’re geographically isolated or truly can’t find other outlets, the Internet has a massive number of online communities where people do truly offer support to each other, such as the commenters on Ana Mardoll’s blog. While these can be essential, it’s still the best in my opinion to have in-person friends. It’s terribly difficult to offer a real hug through the Interwebs.

4) Find your purpose outside of popularity or mass social acceptance.
While finding your purpose is something adults struggle with for years, it doesn’t need to be that complicated. It’s just a matter of finding something you truly love and can spend time doing. This could be playing an instrument, reading a certain type of book, or being into gaming. Having a hobby or fandom can connect you with groups of like-minded people (see step 3) and give you something you can truly enjoy even when people are being terrible to you. If you’re a nerd, it’s extremely likely you already have something like this and it’s something bullies make fun of.

5) Show your strength in your own unique way.
This is basically the point at which you give bullies the middle finger. This is a completely voluntary step, especially if the bullies are especially strong or you’re a special target of theirs. But bullies hate nothing more than feeling like someone is apathetic about their opinion or actively working against them. They want passive people who grovel or at least dare not speak. Unfortunately, this is not as simple as telling them that you don’t care what they have to say. Mainly because you probably do care a little and apathy is extremely difficult to fake.

Thankfully, you don’t have to be completely apathetic – just enough to show that their bullying can’t change your behavior or who you are. It’s saying that, “I oppose what you are and your actions, but I refuse to stoop to your level.” While it’s obviously much more serious than most things anyone will face in high school, I draw the most inspiration from the Civil Rights movement. Those protests and sit-ins weren’t just to raise awareness – they were a direct challenge to those racist institutions. Those protestors were reclaiming their dignity, saying, “No matter how much you push us down, we will stand back up and look you right in the eye.”

Probably one of the most obvious ways of doing this is to be an unabashed fan of something that the bullies have teased you about, whether that’s video games, being in band, musical theater, books, music or whatever. Instead allowing them to shame you, be proud of it. Wear t-shirts, carry books proudly, start a club. At first, it will be incredibly hard because it may draw more attention. But if you show that you will love it despite their opinion, I think they’ll eventually stop. Instead of lack of emotion towards them, it’s an active embracing of a topic despite their social pressure. This is different from ignoring bullies because instead of a lack of emotion towards them, it’s an abundance of enthusiasm in the opposite direction.

There are other ways to subvert the social order as well. I never did it myself, but I think greeting bullies with a giant, enthusiastic greeting every time you see them would be a total mindscrew. This requires an obscene level of self-control and acting skill, but a theater kid might be able to pull it off. Anything that upends their social control will reduce their power and minimize the hurt they can cause others.

I hope that this helps a few people. Any advice that you have for kids or anyone else being bullied?

And This is Yesterday

April 22, 2015 / Shannon Brescher Shea / 1 Comment

Certain albums are woven into periods of our lives, evoking immediate memories of those times. For me, one of the major albums was the Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible, which I listened to on repeat for much of my sophomore year of college. It’s an angry, vicious, depressing album, which perfectly fit my mood that year. I had voluntarily committed to a social group that was both verbally and psychologically abusive to me and others. The album addresses prostitution, anorexia, the Holocaust, fascism, and other lovely subjects that made my problems seem minor. It both allowed me to express my frustration through more than a desperate howl and gave me the strength to leave my situation. So when I happened to see by complete chance in the paper that the Manic Street Preachers were not only playing in the U.S. for the first time in six years, but featuring that specific album, I knew I had to go.

Listening to the album and being at the concert led to a deluge of memories. Sitting at my desk in college, playing music over my computer speakers, trying to drown out the fondness for pop country of my housemates. Playing the first song for one of the few people I thought would understand and having them dismiss it as “just punk.” Analyzing lyrics by the band in my communications papers in a desire to share my discovery. Escaping to hang out with my friend who introduced me to them, who now lives outside DC and attended the concert with me. And most of all, singing along with everything I had, clinging on to it, the music and the darkest lyrics resonating with the all the shit I was going through at the time.

But listening over the last few days was much more than a nostalgia trip. While other albums of theirs mean more to me now and music just doesn’t play as large a role as it once did, I still felt a kinship with it. Lately, I’ve gone through frustrating cycles of activist fatigue. I read about something unjust in the news, which makes me angry and sad. Black children and their parents needing to worry about police violence, climate change worsening with few successes in sight, water shortages and corporate control of water in California, pedestrians and bicyclists being killed in accidents with drivers, women gamers being threatened with rape, famine caused by war and broken food aid bureaucracy. I do what I can – sign a petition, educate the people I know, organize events – but it can never be enough. So frustration and helplessness set in, the antithesis of accomplishing anything useful. Instead of feeling hopeful about the ability to make change or at least fight the good fight, it drains me, leaves me empty. I read more and it starts again, reinforcing its ugly self.

But when I listened to angry music for the first time in a long while, I remembered why it was so powerful for me – it short-circuits that nasty cycle. It provides an outlet for the anger, stops it from turning into frustration, provides immediate catharsis. Most importantly, it draws the darkness out of my head, like sucking out a poison. All of the nasty unpleasantries that crawl through my mind about the general state of humanity are externalized, someone else’s words that I can sing but are no longer mine. That lifts the burden off me, allowing me to see the light and beauty of things. Banging on the elliptical machine with every chorus released something in me that I had been holding onto, holding down far too tightly.

Manic Street Preachers Concert at 9:30 Club in Washington D.C.

So this seemed like a good viewpoint at the concert. As a photo, less so.

Even more than just listening to the album, the concert provided that double dose of nostalgia and relief. While it started with a bit of a stutter – the first song on the album begins with a recorded quote and they came in way after the song would have normally started – I quickly fell into the Concert Trance. That’s when you’re watching a band that you know every song of theirs by heart. You let yourself go, allowing the music to wash over you. It’s both a communal and intensely personal state. It’s also uniquely freeing, especially because I feel responsible for something all the time, whether it’s my job, my child, my writing, my own well-being or an event I’m organizing. I sung along, head banged (gently), jumped up and down like a ninny, and disregarded any hesitations or judgements I might get from someone else or myself. Despite the darkness of lyrics, I came out of it clear-headed and renewed, able to breathe the night air in deep.

Besides the rare opportunity to see my favorite band play live, I’m so glad I rediscovered the power of this music. To my frequent bafflement, mothering has brought out much stronger emotions in me than I’ve ever experienced, both in my reactions to Sprout and the world around him. To be the type of person I want to be and set a good example for Sprout, I need to find better outlets for my emotions, better ways to filter and express them. I don’t think I ever verbalized it, but I think some part of me assumed this music was juvenile, something that moms of toddlers don’t listen to. But that’s actually harmful to my mental health. While it’s not important to me the way it used to be – thank God it doesn’t have to be – it still holds an important place in my life. And I have a poorly researched newspaper blurb alerting me to an incredible concert to thank for it.

A Chance to Breathe

April 16, 2015 / Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment

The last few weeks have felt overwhelming, pressing down with the weight of my to-do list. I’d gape at the number things not done while still feeling like I wasn’t contributing enough – in work, in parenting, in activism, in life. To add to my stress, a number of my plans didn’t turn out as I anticipated. A particular highlight was switching from going to the Cherry Blossom Kite Festival because of 32 F temperatures to brunch, only to find out that the brunch place had an hour and a half wait. Then after entertaining Sprout by watching the bakery and going around a rotating door at least 20 times, we discovered that they did their frying in peanut oil, barring my friend – who has a peanut allergy – from eating anything. The absolute topper seemed to come last Wednesday, the day before we were supposed to fly out on vacation. Chris texted me these dread-inducing words: “Sprout’s sick…Really sick…Everything is covered in puke.” It was accompanied by one of the most pathetic photos I have ever seen of my child, curled up on the couch, blanket pulled up to his chin. Because no one has ever thought a five-hour flight with a pukey toddler is a good idea, we canceled our reservations. But despite everything, it actually turned out to provide the little bit of breathing room I needed. Unfortunately, it was going to get worse before it got better. I stayed home Thursday to help Chris, but planned to go back to work on Friday. But by 7 AM, I knew there was no way in hell I was going anywhere beyond our bed. While I was capable of aiming – unlike Sprout – I still had the fundamental problem that everything in my intestinal tract had a desperate need to leave at once. I slept until 4 PM, only taking a break to listen to Chris read to me from Game of Thrones during Sprout’s nap. Even trying to read my phone brought on a fresh bout of intense nausea. That evening into Saturday morning, I had so little energy that I needed to rest after walking up or down stairs. Not surprising, considering the only thing I had to eat over a 36 hour period was 3 slices of toast with jam. But still a very strange feeling. We were mostly recovered by Saturday afternoon, well enough to go to the park on a day with blue skies and a high of 65 F. Sunday was even more wide open. We were supposed to be on vacation, so we had no obligations. We didn’t go to church because we were nervous about being contagious and no one expected us anyway. We could literally do whatever we wanted; the beautiful weather was beckoning. Rather than try to be ambitious, we stuck close to home and enjoyed its simple pleasures. After reading Sprout 10 different books, I got him into some proper clothes and the three of us walked to a park almost a mile away. Even though we had gone there several times last year, he certainly didn’t remember it. We’re trying to get him used to walking further distances, so we didn’t bring the stroller. Of course, that meant we were subject to every toddler whim, but we had time. We picked up seed pods, cajoled him away from walking up neighbors’ front stairs, woof-woofed at dogs, and rambled along. The other park was a good change of pace, offering a rock-wall and wobbly balance beam in addition to the usual slides and stairs. He was dragging on the way out of the park, so we had to carry him home. But I was so proud of how far he walked there. In the afternoon, we watered the garden with his new watering can, although he ended up watering his pants and shoes more than anything else. Eager to get in some more Tour de Cookie prep, we pulled out the bikes for another short ride. He was absolutely beaming about wearing his “bike hat” and clambered to climb into the trailer. Stopping at our pedestrianized town square, he butted in on other people’s soccer games (who kindly welcomed him) and refused to eat anything but a sample of chocolate scone. He clearly enjoyed the little bite though, as he somehow managed to smear chocolate all around his mouth! Everything was unplanned, straightforward and relaxed. As far as I was concerned, this felt as much like vacation as traveling would have. It was hooky from the hectic mess in my head. So even though it all began with sickness, we ended up with a freedom I often don’t give myself the opportunity to have.

Montessori Practical Life Skills for Modern Times

April 14, 2015 / 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?

Easter with All the Trappings

April 10, 2015 / Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment

While I celebrate Easter as a Christian, I also appreciate its spring celebration aspects as well. Needless to say, rabbits and eggs are much more about fertility than Jesus. So somewhere between the seasonal, commercial, and religious, we celebrated Easter in its many weird forms.

We were partly motivated by my in-laws visiting for the weekend. Because it was too cold to do anything outside, my mother-in-law wanted Sprout to get photos with the Easter Bunny. While I have conflicting feelings about Santa, I’m just apathetic about the Bunny. Considering Sprout’s highly negative reaction to Santa at Christmas, I didn’t have high hopes for the Bunny. I was mostly right. Sprout stood calmly in front of the Bunny, leaning forward to peer at him from a foot or two away. But when we tried to put him on the Bunny’s lap, a wordless look of panic crossed his face. He held out his arms, looked at me and pleaded, “Mama mama!” After only a few moments, I declared it a lost cause and picked him up. I’m not going to try to convince my kid to grin when he’s terrified. The photographer got in one photo before he got properly upset, but he’s far from smiling. My mother-in-law was happy with it though, which was enough for me.

Our other Easter activity that day – dyeing eggs – went over much better. Sprout knows the word “egg” and is starting to learn his colors, so it combined two exciting things for him. I’m not sure, but I think he jumped to the conclusion that the different shades of colored water were paint. (He’s familiar with the idea from the book Mouse Paint, where white mice jump into jars of paint and mix them together.) So when we showed him what happened when you drop a white egg in colored water, much like a white mouse climbing into paint, he caught on very quickly. Despite our cautions to be “gentle, gentle,” he dropped almost every egg into its respective cup of water from a substantial height. Of course, he managed to avoid getting splashed – it all ended up on my mother-in-law’s shirt instead. Thankfully, food coloring does wash out.

The next morning, our dyeing paid off, despite my initial hesitation. While I was afraid Sprout was going to step on them, my mother-in-law convinced me to do a gentle introduction to egg hunting with him on Easter morning. We spread the eggs out on the rug and gave him the carton to put them in. He methodically picked up each egg, looked it as we named the color, and placed it neatly in the carton. The adults actually came much closer to stepping on the eggs than he did! His basket was filled with plastic eggs, which he also loved playing with. Even now, he’s constantly picking them up, opening and closing them and putting them back in the basket. Woe to me for thinking a toddler wouldn’t like filling something up and dumping it back out!

Sprout only received one Easter basket, filled to the brim with sweets. I knew that my in-laws were going to give him candy – even though they knew we would eat most of it – so I didn’t want to do that as well. Besides, candy is one of those things I won’t bother giving him until he asks for it. Instead, I bought him two spring related presents – a set of real gardening tools made for children and the complete collection of Beatrix Potter stories. Both are fabulous, although I severely underestimated how much of a tome the stories were. Hopefully he’ll understand that we can’t read them all in one pre-bedtime session!

After we opened baskets, it was time to go to church. While we had family Easter egg hunts in the past, we included the general public this year for the first time as an outreach event. One of the other church members brought 200 eggs to hide, which I thought was going to be more than enough. Of course, any time you’re overly confident about something, it backfires spectacularly. Much to my surprise, 10 minutes before the hunt was supposed to start, we had a tremendous group of children and parents all over our front churchyard. And a bunch of kids were putting eggs in baskets before I had the chance to say, “Go!” In literally less than 5 minutes, all of the eggs were gone. Knowing that other families were going to show up a little late, I scrounged eggs from Sprout’s basket and that of the church kids’ and re-hid them so they would at least have something to look for. Thankfully, the same folks who brought the eggs also brought extra goodie bags of random toys and candy, so all of the kids that had very few to hunt for at least got goodie bags. We also had a plethora of sweets, so my fellow-church goer Jan made sure every kid got a cookie or cupcake. Thank goodness for extra cookies. I still felt terrible when we had to tell families that there weren’t any eggs left though. At least we have some lessons learned for next year.

The day finished off with dinner at a restaurant modeled after an Adirondack or Rocky Mountains lodge, all wood crossbeams and duck decoys. My father-in-law – who is a pickier eater than Sprout – enjoys the food and the decor. Plus, as Sprout loves running up and down a ramp it has decorated with twinkle lights, we acquiesced to his request of “walk, walk!” several times. He also managed to put away a truly ungodly amount of macaroni and cheese.

Except for a few bobbles, our Easter turned out pretty darn well.

Reintroducing the Bike to a Toddler

April 7, 2015 / 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

March 24, 2015 / 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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We'll Eat You Up – We Love You So

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