Any mom with more than one kid knows that one child is not ever to be compared to another. But they usually don’t know that until they have actually gone ahead and done it.
My first son, Russell was what I like to call a “Cabinet Lock Kid”. That means super-spy-lockdown gear was required to keep him alive because there was no lid, door or portal he would not attempt to get through. By the time he could walk we had a VCR lock (post banana & grilled cheese), a toilet lock (post him standing in it), drawer locks, cabinet locks, door knob covers and a fridge lock (post finding him inside it.) He wanted to know everything that could be known. I was an over zealous first time Mom, to put it mildly. When he was 22 months, we knew he knew his ABC’s, not because HE would ever sing them but because if WE sang them and missed a letter, he would fill it in. We did animal flash cards together at breakfast every single morning. Then letters. Then numbers. Then words. He was bright and shiny and very information-friendly. If I put information in, it stayed in. By the time Ivy came along, I was convinced this was how it worked with children. I thought you just told them stuff and then they knew it. I thought that if I was just on top of it enough to keep feeding information, then my kids would get as intelligent as humanly possible. I thought all kids were the same.
I should have suspected this was not true when no locks whatsoever were needed for Ivy. She never tried to climb into a drawer, get raisins from a top shelf or even open a cupboard. She sat in one spot, content to watch her brother, Flash Gordon, live his high speed life. When she finally started to walk, it was as if she had been studying it for ages, to make sure she knew how it worked. No real attempts were made until she was ready to do it all of the time. As you do with your second child, due to sheer weariness, I got a little behind on the whole animal flash cards and ABC’s routine. Not to worry though, I would prevail. I had kept a relatively steady stream of progressive info coming at Russell and she was always near enough to absorb, even though she was quiet about it, or so I thought.
About the time she turned 4, I started to get serious about giving her one-on-one Information Feedings. We started having our own “school time” together, without Flash. I thought we should solidify letters and numbers and move on from there. On this particular day, I was focusing on the letter “K”. We looked at a flashcard of the letter. We traced it on paper. We made the sounds “K” makes. We said all sorts of K-words. We probably spent a half an hour on just that letter. When I figured she had it nailed down, I thought we ought to do a little recap and then move onto a number so I held up the flashcard and said, “So Ivy, what is this letter’s name?” She bit her lip and said, “Ummmmmmmmm…Ed?” “What? Ed? What do you mean, Ed? The name of this letter is “K!” I was baffled for a bit that after a solid half hour of “K” training, she still didn’t know it was K. What the heck? My traditional Information feeding was not working with this one.
Later that day it dawned on me what had occurred. She was sitting at the kitchen table by herself having a snack of a water bottle and a cheese stick. I could hear her quietly talking to herself, as was her way and I decided to covertly listen in. She had the water bottle in one hand and the cheese stick in the other and this is what I heard, “Awwwww, I want to be a water bottle. Pleeeeeeeeease?? Let me be a water bottle. Nope, you’ll never be a water bottle, you’ll alllllwaaaaaayyyys be a piece of cheese.” Her food had become characters in a drama only she could fully envision. That is because the rest of us look at cheese and only see cheese. But not Ivy. She sees another dimension. And then it struck me, she needed “K” to have an identity in order to incorporate him into her world. Boring old info was not going to cut it. I was going to have to revamp my educational approach to meet her need for everything to be a part of her internal world. This is how information would stick. If you could sing it to her, if you could make her Barbie say it to her, if you could make it out of macaroni, if you could tell her a story with “K” as the main character (maybe otherwise known as Ed), then she would know it. She needed to experience things to know them, not just be told them. Because some kids don’t do flash cards.
And so it has gone for 18 and a half years. Ivy is about to graduate this week and I still feel in shock and wonder that I have been able to witness her life. She is full of gentleness and poise and truly does see the world from a unique, beauty-filled place. She has been making and doing beautiful things from the get go. She sings, she acts, she dances, she paints, she writes, she photographs, she edits, she loves and she blows the world up with whimsy. She brings heaven down to earth.
Here’s another adorable example of her alternate reality. It was family picture day and I told everybody to just put on their favorite outfit. This is what she came out in. Who am I to tell her that a ballet dress and a furry crown cannot be her favorite outfit? I dare not. Not when parenting whimsy. I would never want to squash, squelch or stamp down any beauty my beautiful child wants to funnel into this planet.
I have video footage of her while the kids were outside playing around the sprinkler one day that pretty much sums it up. The other kids are paying attention to the water and running around flailing their arms. She is walking slowly and deliberately around the perimeter of the play area, pretty much in the bushes, performing a musical for herself. She is singing in her stripy bikini, flipping her hair over her shoulder and singing some obviously intense song, complete with dialog that she is making up on the spot… for a reallllly long time. This is Ivy. She is here and somewhere else all at the same time. We have felt like we were stewarding a fairy princess every single day.
I celebrate all the differences in my four children and now I know, some kids do flashcards…and some kids don’t. Thank you Ivy for being a delight to raise. Thank you for making our lives beautiful and wondrous. We love you and we are beyond of proud of you – not just for the things you can do but because of the beauty that you are and the way it changes the world.
🙂