Watching the Gears Turn
November 26, 2007
Possibly the most interesting part of parenthood for me is the daily disabusement of my preconceptions.
Before having a child, I was fairly certain of many things. After having spent a few years at this, the only thing I know is that I’m just as likely to be wrong as right when it comes to my assumptions.
For instance - my child now has her letters pretty much down. Which means most of my day is filled with two types of questions: 1) the archetypal “why” question and 2) the “Mommy, what does X-x-x-x spell?” question.
The first one I was prepared for. I pretty much answer whatever whys I can, and those I can’t I either answer with an “I don’t know, let me find out” or an “okay, that’s enough why questions for now” (that second one usually happens somewhere around “but why don’t you know, Mommy?”)
The second one I didn’t really expect.
I kind of thought that learning to read was more a matter of memorizing letters, learning their sounds, then sounding them out. Not with my kiddo, apparently. She’s a ‘whole word’ kind of girl. Not for Buttercup the ’sound it out’ or ‘phonics’ method. She sees words as whole entitities.
She also made an observation the other day that was something I didn’t notice until somewhere late in grammar school.
Going through the alphabet, she asked me why some letters start with their sound and some end with it.
Think about it. A, B, C, D, E, G, I, J, K, O, P, Q, T, V, Z when you say them out-loud all start with the sound they make. F, L, M, N, R, S, U, X, Y all end with a sound they make. H & W have nothing to do with their names soundwise.
This is because English is such a mish-mash of other linguistic roots.
The ancient greek alphabet has all of the letters starting with the sound they make. Makes it easier to learn what each one sounds like.
This is something that most of us native English speakers take for granted. We memorize the names, we memorize the sounds they make, we learn to read, we move on. Few of us take the time to analyze it. But apparently my 4 year old noticed.
That wasn’t something I expected. But it’s kind of neat. Because with every new thing she learns, I learn something new too. Bonus!!
Oh Good Heavens…
November 19, 2007
Did I mention I was going on vacation?
Errrrr… no, I guess I didn’t.
Well, Buttercup, GeekDaddy and I just got back from a lovely cruise. I’d tell you all about it if it weren’t for this damned vertigo I’ve got due to a head-cold combined with being on a ship for a week, (still swaying) and then flying.
I’ll tell you more soon. Honestly.
Eep.
Yeah, I actually spent more than 9 days without cracking the laptop or the cellphone once. Now *that* is a vacation!
Graffitti
November 7, 2007
I walked into Buttercup’s bathroom tonight, post-bath, to see that there was some leftover ‘graffiti’ from her playtime with GeekDaddy.
She has bathtub crayons that get a solid workout now that she’s working on learning her letters.
Tonight’s artistic endeavor is worth mentioning only due to a genetic quirk. She had written her name (substituting the word “GIRL” for it in the illustration below only for length) and “DADDY” in big bold orange crayon.
It just took my brain a second to realize that it looked like this:
Yep, my brain had automatically turned it around and read it. It’s inherited, I would guess. My mother used to complain that as a child I wrote her many a note in ‘mirror-backward’ writing that she had to go hold up to the mirror to read. Something I never understood, because I can mentally flip it without effort. I still have a few samples she gave me when she moved about a decade ago. They look about the same as above, only with neater penmanship.
Apparently, this is something Buttercup does as well.
It’s going to be fun trying to get her to understand that English is written from Left to Right, while mathematics is the opposite… something that only really clicks when you realize that the left-to-right writing is to keep right-handed people from smearing the ink of the letters they’ve just written. Ask any lefty (I’m ambi) and they’ll tell you how tricky it is to learn how not to do that when writing.
Ah well. At least GeekDaddy can read that way too.
Let’s just hope her Preschool & Kindergarten teachers can.
Information Society
November 5, 2007
It’s hard to remember that the majority of people rely upon ‘professionals’ to know things for them.
Being the information-junkie/knowledge-addict I am (as mentioned in my last post), I’m the person who wants to know the why behind the what. I tend to research anything that impacts me greatly… the internet search engine was one of my dreams come true. I don’t really know how well I’d function without ready access to complex information when I want it.
I used to practically live in my schools’ libraries as a kid.
In grade school, I knew all the librarians quite well - in junior high, I spent my lunch hours volunteering in the library (thereby avoiding the whole social-drama that is lunchtime at junior high) and got to know the head librarian so well that she took me out to lunch at the end of the year as a thank you. In high school, I got sucked into computers during the early stages of the Personal Computing revolution - but still spent a ton of time in the library, as the 1200 baud modem wasn’t exactly going to get me insta-access to anything useful.
I suppose you can blame my parents. As children, whenever my brother and I would ask a complex question (why is the sky blue? what causes a rainbow?) we were met with the challenge “well, I suppose you ought to go find that out - you’ve got one week to get back to me with an answer…” and when the week was up, you’d better know, because they seldom forgot to check back.
As an adult, this tends to lead to me being an “informed consumer.”
I don’t just blindly put faith in someone else’s opinion simply because s/he has a title. If my car mechanic recommends a part or procedure - he’d better be prepared to explain why, and he’d better expect that if I don’t already know about the functionality of said part, I’ll be researching it independently before I give a go-ahead. If my doctor dispenses advice or an Rx, she already knows that she’s better off not ‘dumbing down’ the explanation. So does my dentist. And my hair dresser.
Why, you ask, am I blathering on about this?
Well, in a way, possessing too much information is a double-edged sword. Knowing what to do but not being able to do it is often infuriating.
Take today for instance.
Buttercup has croup. This is the 5th time in 5 years that she’s gotten it at this time of year. The symptoms are the same. The progression is the same. The treatment is the same. When she gets to the point she is at today (losing voice, swollen throat) we go to the doctor’s office - and they give her a shot of an oral steroid to reduce the swelling, and we treat with Motrin/ibuprofen as an anti-inflammatory and fever reducer. Given that it’s viral, that’s about all you can do.
But as easy as that sounds - in order to achieve this, we had to drive 1/2 an hour away to her pediatrician and spend 2 hours waiting due to the abundant crowds (hey! guess what? croup is going around right now!) in order to spend 5 minutes with a doctor who confirmed exactly what I said above and had a nurse come in to give her the steroid - then drive 1/2 an hour back home. 3 hours to do something that should take 5 minutes.
But it can’t take 5 minutes - because the “normal” person out there can’t be trusted with medicine. The “normal” person out there doesn’t read the label… doesn’t think to check for drug interactions in advance, doesn’t worry about side-effects until after they’ve manifested, doesn’t keep up on medical advances that are pertinant to them. The “normal” person overdoses their infant on cold & cough medication, requiring the manufacturers to recall the drugs not because there’s a problem with them, but because there’s a problem with the users.
So because the “normal” person is too stupid to use a little common sense - those of us who do maintain half-a-clue are prohibited from accessing things like prescritpion only drugs.
Unless I wanted to go to medical school and cosmetology school, I can’t have access to simple things like medicine or even hair-dye (yeah, you can use that crap in a box they sell at the grocery store, I know what professional lines and colors work with my hair and how to achieve those effects - but without a board-certified license? I can’t buy them.)
One of the sharpest sys-admins I know doesn’t have a college degree. This keeps him out of many, many job opportunities where the gate-keepers say that ‘applicants must have Bachelors Degree in field.’ I used to teach CIS - and I can tell you that I saw hundreds of students graduating with ‘degrees in the field’ who would be hard pressed to boot up a server, let alone admin one… yet here’s this guy who is pretty much a wizard at it who gets overlooked 99 out of 100 times. Every company he has worked for has ended up lauding him and wondering why they can’t find more like him.
There is a tendency in today’s world to think that a label means something. I’m really not sure where that came from, or whose idea it was to foster it. If I had to guess, it was the lawyers. After all, the concept of having to go to an ‘accredited law school’ and pass a Bar exam before being allowed to practice law is a relatively modern one. There are still a few states in the U.S. in which the only requirement is passing the bar - if one can do so without attending law school.
Still, in every ‘profession’ there seems to come a point where there is a push to ‘legitimize’ some practioners while ostracizing or banning others. As recently as World War II, women without any nursing experience or education at all were allowed to enlist in the armed services as nurses. Today, it requires years of schooling and test taking.
I could go on with examples… but I’m sure that would simply be overkill. If anyone is still even reading at this point, that is.
In the end, what is frustrating for me is the number of times I’ve had someone ask me if I’ve had formal training in whatever arena we are dealing with ‘because I know so much about it.’ All I can think is “why doesn’t everyone?” Why doesn’t the average person read the insert in the box that comes with medicine? Why doesn’t s/he ask the dentist what tool they are using? Why doesn’t s/he take 10 minutes to research something so pertinent to his/her own health and well-being rather than say, watching the latest episode of Desperate Housewives?
It really makes no sense to me. I guess it won’t make sense to my daughter either - since she’ll be schooled in the ‘that’s a good question, you’ve got a week to give me an answer’ method early on as well. But sometimes I just wish I could call the pharmacy and say “listen, my daughter takes the following medicines, she has no known drug allergies, she has croup and needs an oral steroid to reduce the swelling in her throat and vocal chords. I’ve done the research, there’s no conflicts in the PDR, she’s never had an issue with it in the 4 previous instances, and I know the correct dosage for her weight is XX ml… can you please get some ready for us? Thanks!” and know that they would.
Yeah. And I want to win the lottery too.
Time is a Vortex…
November 5, 2007
…and it just sucks!
Seriously tho, I’ve been meaning to update here - it’s just that things are crazy right now. We’re trying to get ready for a vacation that starts Friday - Buttercup is sick (looks like croup) and that means multiple awakenings in the middle of the night. I keep thinking of things to say, but never finding the time to sit down and say them. And when I do have the time? I don’t have enough functional braincells to come up with coherent sentences.
Such is parenthood, I suppose.
When I was pregnant with my daughter, I worried like any soon-to-be-new-parent does. But honestly, probably not about the same things. One of my greatest fears was that my daughter wouldn’t be smart.
Yes, yes - I know - we’re all supposed to pretend that we just want happy, healthy babies. But I said “honestly” above, and I’m being candid here. I was worried that my daughter wouldn’t be smart. By that I mean really smart. I know that intellectual ability is the one area we’re all supposed to pretend we don’t take pride in and don’t value. It’s okay to be ecstatic if your child has the athletic ability of Tiger Woods or the voice of Charlotte Church - but we’re supposed to keep quiet about it if s/he has the brain of Albert Einstein.
The thing is, if it’s shallow to value intelligence, then I’m one of the most shallow people out there.
I couldn’t have married my husband if he hadn’t been at least as intelligent as I am. I really am incapable of maintaining any kind of lasting friendship with someone of simply “average” intelligence… not because they aren’t valuable people - but because we value different things.
I’m an information junkie… a knowledge addict, if you will. If posed the question “would you rather be extraordinarily beautiful or extraordinarily smart?” there would be no hesitation as I answered the latter. What I find fascinating in other people is their minds. Stephen Hawking is far sexier to me than any Hollywood pinup boy.
So the prospect of having a child who fell lower on the spectrum when it comes to that sort of thing was rather, well, terrifying. Because I didn’t know (still don’t) that I wouldn’t end up being too shallow to be a good parent to her as a result.
Yes, this is a handicap. Yes, it is a personality flaw of mine. No, I’m not going to gloss over it. I am what I am.
Fortunately for both me and Buttercup, she’s smarter than I am.
Fortunately for me right now, she is not yet as informed or educated as I am… because when I say smarter I mean raw intellectual potential. For the moment, I can make up the difference with data and experience. I have knowledge and wisdom to balance out the difference in our intelligence - thank heavens. But I’d say I’m going to be hard-pressed to keep up with her when she’s a teenager.
I say this because I clearly remember being her age. I remember vivid scenes and experiences. I also remember that I wasn’t as quick to pick up or understand things she does at the rate she does.
Little things remind me of this all the time. Like lying in bed with her the other night when she first started getting sick, trying to calm her down enough to go to sleep. After 5 minutes of silence in the dark, as I thought she was drifting off, a little voice suddenly says “Mommy? Why do we have teeth?”
I explained to her that it was so we could chew our food, so we wouldn’t choke. She then asked me why babies didn’t have teeth - and trying to avoid a biology lecture at bedtime I said “that’s just how we’re born - that’s why babies don’t eat food when they’re born, they drink milk - and when you get teeth, you start eating food.”
“That’s silly,” she said, “if you need something you ought to have it before you need it. Why don’t we have teeth before we need them?”
Trying to avoid having a discussion with my 4 1/2 year old about biology, evolution vs. creationism, and intelligent design vs. random mutations I simply said “I don’t know honey, go to sleep.”
Yes, it’s a cop out. But seriously, what else was I going to say just then?
I foresee many, many long discussions in our future. I wonder if I can learn enough additional data before then to hold my own. As she said, it’s silly not to have something before you need it if you know you need it… So I’d better get to work acquiring it before she figures it out.
Especially since my new fear isn’t that my child won’t be smart enough for me - but that I won’t be smart enough for her. Ah well, she’s compassionate too - she’ll probably take pity on her poor, old shallow Mom… and only laugh a little bit at me.
