Every morning, when the kids arrive at preschool, they get to choose an activity. There’s painting in one room, playdoh in another, counting and weighing acorns in a third, blocks and dressups downstairs--you get the picture. K waits at the cubbies for E to arrive, follows E around until she picks an activity, and then settles in next to her. When I visited E’s class to read a Hanukkah story and light the menorah, E stayed glued to me and K stayed glued to E.
I’m a firm believer in playdates as Mommy free time. However, E, like her sister at that age, is not at her best when her turf is invaded, even by friends she adores, even when she’s been looking forward to nothing but the playdate for days. So I decided to take the hands-on approach: I read them books, I played Candyland, I suggested they dance to the Pink CD E put on, I watched them dance (very cute and I only worried a little about what K’s policeman dad would think if he knew his four year old was dancing to Pink), and finally I tied longer strings onto the balloons still floating around from E’s birthday almost a month ago and they played happily, chasing their balloons and each other around the house. So yeah, it’s true: paying attention to your kids can definitely make things go more smoothly.
But what I really want to write about is Candyland. Has anyone noticed the changes in Candyland? Not the changes in how the game looks--there have been several of those--but the changes in how the game works? Namely:
1) When you land on a space with a black dot, you now just skip a turn--rather than waiting till you draw a card that’s the same color as your space.
2) The last space in the game, the one you need to land on to win, is now a rainbow, which means you can win with any card--rather than having to wait for a card of the right color (was it purple?) which of course meant you were likely to draw the lollipop card or the peanut brittle card and go right back into the game.
3) There are a lot more double cards (the ones that let you move forward two orange spaces, say, instead of just one) than there used to be.
Clearly these changes are meant to make the game go faster. There’s a piece of me that wants to complain about how I used to walk to school five miles barefoot in the snow, and if I had to wait on the red square with the black dot till I drew a red card, well kids today damn well should be waiting on that red square with that black dot till they draw red cards, and how are they going to learn perseverance, and this is why we’re going to hell in a handbasket.
And then there’s another piece of me that wants to thank the powers that be for doing anything they can to make those endless games of Candyland even just a tiny bit less endless.
[Moral dilemma: E doesn't want me to write about her. She okayed the ice skating, but vehemently protested this one. M (who never met a spotlight she didn’t like) and S say I should just write about her anyways. After all, she’s only four and can’t read. But my maternal ethics are feeling challenged. Who controls a kid’s representation? And how much autonomy should a four year old have, anyways?]
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