getting excited about science

Science Center Parking ... $9.00

Tickets to the Discovery Room ... $7.00

One year's undergraduate tuition with room & board at MIT ... $53,000

Watching your 15-month-old son get excited about science ... priceless.

Touch and Feel

One of Holden's favorite parts of daycare, I've been told, is the "sensory table"--a concave table space that his teacher fill with things like sand, dried pasta, ripped up tissue paper, and--apparently--some kind of cool bluish suds. Here are a few pictures of Holden taking full advantage of the kind of mess that he couldn't often make at home.

Newborns vs Toddlers

A very recent baby boom among our colleagues and friends has made me reflect on the good, the bad, and the ugly of newborn vs toddler parenting. Yes, I must admit that I occasionally get "baby lust," as they say, for those early days when Holden was a wee wee one. But then I remember the 2-hr feedings and late night wake ups, and things stop seeming so rosy. So I thought it would be fun to consider some of things that make the "newborn" stage great, and some of the things that definitely don't!

Five Great Things about the "Newborn" Stage
5) Limited mobility (no baby proofing required!)
4) Communication is Direct (sure, they cry a lot, but it only means one of 2 or 3 things)
3) Need to do something? Just wear them! (I can't emphasize this benefit enough)
2) Car-seat sleeping (you can still bring them to parties at this stage, and they'll snooze through the entire thing)
1) The way they fall asleep on your chest for hours (nothing better!)

Five Not-So-Great Things about the "Newborn" Stage
5) Lack of adult sleep (no explanation required)
4) Limited mobility (I just LOVE watching my toddler run around with glee)
3) Breast Pumps, Bottles, and the constant dish washing, ugh
2) Sooo much diaper changing
1) No hugs, no blowing kisses, no "mamas," no giggles (these things light up my day, every day)

close encounters of the stuffed animal kind

Recently, Holden has grown quite attached to his expanding cadre of stuffed animal friends. He has some at daycare, some in his room upstairs, and some in our living room (and probably one or two in the car, too). When I was a kid, I loved stuffed animals, so I love encouraging his attachment to his little plush friends. And, it turns out that it can be very beneficial to a toddler's development to play with stuffed animals, as it can help them develop important social and emotional skills through role playing and pretend play. During nap time at daycare, Holden often gathers his stuffed animals (esp. Dog, who we'll have to feature in a future blog post) and has a party at his cot. His favorite animal rotates among the group (which is good ... prevents jealous rivalries from rising up within the crew).

For quite some time, his hands-down favorite stuffed animal was Terry the Pterodactyl. When Holden would wake up in the morning, he would reach out for his little psychedelic buddy, squeezing him and holding on to him during diaper changes. He still loves Terry, but Holden has learned to share the love with all of his animal friends.

So I simply wanted to introduce some of Holden's plush posse:





Reintroducing Terry the Pterodactyl
(quite the party animal)









Chuckanucka
(Holden now has more teeth than he does)










Teddy the Bear
(this was my stuffed animal when I was a kid)










Black Bear
(we picked this up for Holden during our trip to Tennessee)







[not pictured here] There's also Rosie the Bear, Peaco (another Ugly Doll), the aforementioned Dog, an unnamed blue bear that used to play lullaby music, and an array of smaller plush toys like some tiny bears and a little dog that barks when you squeeze it. I'm sure I'm forgetting someone, and for that I apologize -- but we'll have to introduce more of Holden's furry friends in a follow-up post.

My kid could paint that!

How is it possible that an art historian and a museum educator can have a child and not be constantly posting about his explorations in art? I'm not sure, but I hope I can start to catch up with this post -- which will include images of Holden's "recent work" interspersed with snarky banter about the art world (I couldn't resist).

To start with, Holden gets to create art almost every day at his day care. They have an art activity room, but the teachers also come up with fun and creative things for the little tots to do in their own classroom. For example, a couple months ago, the teachers taped paper to the bottom of a table, and had the kids scoot under the table to paint on their backs ... a la Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. Some of the kids were too scared to do this, but not Holden -- he had a blast! They also do a lot of finger painting, and playing with materials and textures with art projects. Outside of his day care, we also make sure Holden's coloring and drawing (how else is he going to maintain his mad art skills?!). These past few weeks, in the cold of winter, we've been going to the Climatron at the Botanical Garden where they have a coloring activity station for kids. Holden was more interested in the kids books and puzzles, but I managed to catch a pic of him coloring with mommy (shown here).

But let's get down to business ... so how does Holden's painting hold up to professional artists working in the "real" art world? I mean, ever since the 2007 film "My Kid Could Paint That," I think every parent wonders if their toddler can make paintings that they could slip into the Museum of Modern Art and absolutely get away with it (or, if not, whether they could pull off a scheme that would get them lots of money and media attention at the expense of their 4-year-old child, and absolutely get away with it). The 2007 film obviously sparked a lot of controversy, as it tapped into the single most frequent comment or thought that visitors have when looking at modern abstract painting ... "my kid could paint that." I've heard it in lots of variations, but it's always a challenge hurdled at any museum that displays work by artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Cy Twombly, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, etc. etc., and to the museum educators at those museums who are faced with these stubborn (yet somewhat valid) concerns about modern and contemporary abstract or minimalist painting. This challenge is particularly difficult for the museum educator who happens to have a small child at home who is creating art and coming out with products that seem only mere steps away from hanging on the wall of an art gallery or auction house. Perhaps these feelings are somewhat akin to those of the parents of Marla Olmstead (the talented child at the center of "My Kid Could Paint That"). Anyway, I thought I'd have a bit of fun looking at some of Holden's recent art projects through the lens of some "art speak" and those artists Holden already seems to be paralleling:

Here are two rather transgressive paintings that Holden has created in the past 3 months, both untitled. You can see how he truly cites the smudge as each work's proper subject -- each mark with its own history. More performative than illustrative, Holden's inimitable visual language of scribbles, scratches, and scrawls are employed to both suggestive and sublime effects
[for those of you interested, I'm pulling this straight from the Art Institute of Chicago's section on artist Cy Twombly]:


The image below is a detail of a work that Holden created by scribbling on a piece of reflective cardboard. What parent wouldn't be proud of such spontaneous mark-making, obviously the result of both split-second decision-making and happenstance, choreography and chance. Each physical "performance" is a unique and unrepeatable event, but the final product is always subject to artistic will.
[these fine words have been adapted from the National Gallery of Art's praise of none-other-than Jackson Pollock].


And here are some of the artists and artworks that Holden is aspiring toward as he develops his own painterly style (you can see some similarity here already, and perhaps even with your own kid's art):

Joan Mitchell
(don't get me wrong, I really do love her stuff)

Cy Twombly (adult)

Cy again (much deeper)

2010 graduate from Yale's MFA painting program
(actually, I think Holden's already doing better than this)

OK, snarkiness aside, I am actually really happy that Holden gets to experiment with finger-painting, coloring, and making messes with art supplies ... and I hope he never loses his excitement and creativity. While Holden's paintings shown above will never be exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (unless I try to slip one in on my next visit), they will certainly be on view on our fridge ... at least until we get a fresh supply of new work. And we'll try and keep you updated on his expanding oeuvre ; )

Sign Language = Fewer Tears

Holden, Mike, and I have become big fans of sign language over the last few months. It's made so much of our daily life easier. Even though Holden's been learning both signs and words at about the same rate recently, the signs have proven helpful as points of clarification. And apparently at daycare they've been incredibly useful as well: his teacher reported him using "help" recently, in addition to his collection of "mores" and "pleases." According to a recent article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, sign language can continue to be useful into the terrible twos. The ability to make their needs known can simply lead to fewer tears. And as a blogger on babble.com notes, signs also help with language development.

So why signs instead of just words? As the Inquirer article notes, babies' tongue and mouth muscles don't develop as quickly as hand muscles, so even if they can understand words they can only vocalize them in a basic way (or not at all) when they are young. Signs are a way for them to fill in the communication gap. Admittedly, some signs are also too hard for them to make at a young age, but they can--and do--create their own primitive versions of them. For example, the sign for water (using the "w" sign tapped against your chin) is hard to do:
But Holden adjusts by putting his open fingers against chin saying "wa wa." (For more pictures of signs like these see www.babies-and-sign-language.com.) Banana is also very hard to do, but Holden's managed to create a version of it that's easy to understand. Incidentally, these are all ASL signs. The benefit of using ASL signs, instead of some kind of invented 'baby' signs, is that they are widely known and can be easily used at daycare and later in life.

So here's an incomplete list of some of signs that Holden knows:
-more
-milk
-water
-cup/drink (we use it to ask if he's thirsty)
-eat (used to see if he's hungry)
-book (he now verbalizes this one instead)
-banana (this is the only food we've done, we're working on more soon!)
-please
-help
-all done
-up
-"itsy bitsy spider" (not an ASL sign per se, it's just his favorite song!)

Language Immersion

As Mike mentioned in the previous post, Holden has recently been surprising us everyday with a new word (or new primitive version of a word). He's also been demonstrating new signs at a fairly rapid rate, which is making me realize that WE need to learn some new signs to teach him. I also realized recently that only we can fully understand his developments--that is to say, when others see him babbling and flapping his hands about, much of it seems like, well, babbling. And when I'm around other kids whose parents SWEAR their child knows numerous words, I'm left wondering if they're imagining things.

I'm not bringing this up to belittle my or any other child's language process. Rather, I just want to highlight the collaborative process that makes language happen for a child. Scholars often liken the child's learning process to that of someone in a foreign land. First a person learns crude versions of the most necessary words ("si," "por favore," etc.), often using gestures to help make his/her intent clear. The longer one is immersed in the foreign land, the more their language, then tone and even sense of humor, develops. But I think in the case of toddlers, this goes both ways. Parents who are immersed in their toddler's world learn their child's particular quirks--their sense of humor, what bothers them, what makes them laugh. And they respond to their mumblings because they understand the context.

Thus, even if it sounds like "ba ba," the parents know it's "blackberries" (or "brown bear" in another context) because they have interacted in an intimate way with their child. Signs help, I think (even if they child creates his/her own unique version of the sign). They help the parents know when "mo" means "more" or when it means "milk". And incidentally, it helps the daycare provider or anyone else that might know sign language. But what makes language development so exciting and so magical is the intimate collaborative process between parents and child, the co-discovery of new ways to communicate. I LOVE that I know exactly what my child means when he says "mo" or "no" (which means "snow" not "no," in case you were wondering). And I love that he trusts me enough to try out new unsophisticated versions of words. And I thought learning to walk was cool. Not even close to this process.

The Word

At this stage in his little toddler life, Holden's brain seems to be on fire. He's just processing so much, and trying to communicate more and more each day. In the past few weeks, he has definitely begun to understand a lot more that we are saying, too. And he's constantly working on new words and new sounds. And that brings me to tonight's word ... or words, rather.

The past couple of days, Holden has two big words that he has been working on. The first one is "blackberries." For quite some time now, this has been one of his favorite foods ... and they've been on sale at the grocery stores, which is even better. He can shovel down about half a package of blackberries at one sitting, even when the berries are really sour (aka "out of season"). Tonight at dinner, he decided this was his new favorite word. Except, when he says it, it sounds more like "bla-ba's," but he points feverishly at the blackberry package. He probably said it more than a dozen times this evening while he was eating the last of our blackberries, and then he got so mad when they were all gone.

The second word that Holden has been working on this week is "Isla" (pronounced "eye-la," although Holden makes it sound more like "yay-ya"). This is our friend Kimberly's daughter, Isla, who is just a bit younger than Holden. They go to the same daycare, and used to be in adjacent classrooms -- although I'm not sure how often they see each other at daycare these days, with Holden moved to the toddler room. Last weekend, Kimberly and Dave (and Isla) invited us over for brunch, and Holden was practicing saying "Isla" before our visit. And ever since then, whenever he sees the picture of Isla that is on our fridge (from their holiday card), Holden gets super excited and starts saying "yay-ya," "yay-ya" in his best attempt to say "Isla."

So, Holden's definitely continuing to work on his words, now making valiant attempts at much more complicated words like "blackberries" and "Isla." He's been doing a really good job recently with simpler words like "ball," "book," "done," "more," and even taking a stab at "water" (which is "wa" or "wa-wa") ... and this is all on top of the sign language he uses on a constant basis. But this all means that he's comprehending a much larger vocabulary, and then trying to make some of these new sounds on his own. Like I said, his brain is on fire.

Sledding!!

Over Christmas weekend, we traveled to my parent's house in Iowa. In the past it's been incredibly cold in Iowa over the holidays, but thankfully this year it was in the upper 20s. And there were about 4 to 6 inches of snow on the ground. In other words...perfect weather for introducing Holden to sledding! So Grandpa C. found an old family sled, and mom and dad--and uncle Wil--pushed Holden about through the backyard. Our only problem was that pushing him around was exhausting, but Holden loved it so much he didn't want to stop. Thankfully--eventually--he took a spill when Wil pulled him a hill and did a little "face-plant" in the snow. And finally, he was ready to go inside...where Grandma C. had hot chocolate (well, luke-warm chocolate, to be accurate) ready for him. A nice Christmas afternoon, indeed.

Christmas gifts

I think 13.5 months might be the perfect age for Christmas. They are excited about the lights and the gifts, but they haven't been affected by commercialism. In other words, you can get away with giving them hand-me-downs. Or clothes. Or gifts they've already played with before.

As long as they come with tissue paper, or wrapping paper, or boxes.
Because isn't that the fun part?

projects

Often when Holden's independently playing he starts on what we like to call "projects." He gets very focused at completing whatever task it is. Very slow, serious, and deliberate. The task usually involves his blocks, and we--the adults--usually don't understand it. Here, above, is one of today's projects, which will call chair-block design. The mind of a toddler is a wonderful mystery.