There were three people being helped and one ahead of me in line at the post office. Even this early, I’ve never seen so few there in December.
But the stuff I ordered for the grands to come here first so I could wrap it–those haven’t come yet. So much for bypassing Big South American River. Turns out Monday we go on total lockdown for three weeks, and I don’t think going out to ship presents to young children counts as an essential trip under the new guidelines.
2020 is almost over.
We’ll figure it out.
Legos came in plain squares and rectangles of mostly red and blue and the occasional green or yellow when I was a kid, one or two sizes each and plain and hard and uninviting and I remember my grandmother wanting me to go play with the ones in her basket and me feeling like, Are you kidding me? How old do you think I am? Toddlers build towers!
As they got far more sophisticated I didn’t see for the longest time why a kid should just assemble from a directions sheet whatever someone else had dreamed up. Why not use their own imagination?
As if I ever did with them, so never mind.
But yarn! I remember watching my mother’s hands assembling plain straight string into beautiful, warm, cabled sweaters. Her projects always got my attention and the firmest determination that someday I was going to be able to do that, too. I remember studying the puzzle of her motions, the steady, accumulative loop-over-loop.
My husband’s family has always loved puzzles.
Watching my seven and nine year old grandsons showing off their Lego creations over FaceTime, I finally really got it: they’re putting together not just a puzzle but a 3-D one that helps develop fine motor coordination and their ability to envision what comes next and to check and correct and not be satisfied till it’s right and when they’re done, it’s not just a bunch of plastic bricks that fall right back apart but an actual toy that they play with with pride.
It teaches them about taking care of things that have unseen fragility.
Of things falling apart, of resilience when they do if they get a bit too exuberant flying their planes and that if work must be done to repair it, it means something to you, then you sit down and you spend the time and you repair it.
A frog/reknit, if you will: the resources remain, all it requires is you.
If their baby brother plays bam smash crash at them you forgive him, because, he doesn’t know, and they’re old enough that they get that.
But soon enough he will and it will be his turn.
Their sister’s already there.
But for her sixth birthday, and to be as different from Christmas the next day as possible, I decided she’s ready for the tactility of making her own fabric, too.
The old-fashioned metal loom from my childhood, with that bit of a loop shape at the top of each little bar to help hold your work in place. Cotton loops: you can make an actually useful (if small) potholder, unlike acrylic which could melt in high heat. Harrisville did it right.
That present, at least, is being sent straight there.