A Pair of Fresh Eyes

Posted in Parenting on Feb 17, 2010 - 05:02 PM

If I directed everything my daughter was to ever learn in her life--or if someone else did, for that matter--I would abandon all hope for the survival of her creativity, originality, and sparkling personality itself.

I have plenty of experience with having those three things and then some crushed by plenty of people who were supposed to educate me, after all. But I'm beginning to notice just how much she learns and sees on her own, and if I or anyone else tried to take that from her, she simply wouldn't be the same person.

Yesterday I was cutting the top of a facial tissue box off so we could use it to hold our growing pile of colored pencils. My daughter promptly asked if she could use it for a hospital bed for her sick (stuffed) dog, who'd fallen and hit his head. I realized that she was thinking about how my father had fallen and suffered a head injury last fall and was coming to terms with it in her own way, and immediately agreed to give her the box. She proceeded to care for the dog, much like we had done for my father.

When we play "Shared Stories," where we both say a word of the story until the end, she never ceases to amaze me and never comes up with the words you would traditionally expect. If I start with "Once," she definitely won't follow with the tried-and-true "upon;" she'll go with "grasshoppers" or something like that, straight into the story!

The other day I was drawing a pretty scary picture of a hybrid spider person while she was napping, something I wouldn't dream of doing when she's around--and suddenly found her standing at my elbow, peering at my sketch with sleepy eyes. She yawned and pronounced it pretty -- "I like her hair, Mommy" -- and simply went to get herself a snack. Just like that, she blew my assumption out of the water. She simply sees things with a different pair of eyes than I do, which is more beautiful than anything I could ever attempt to describe.

Who on Earth would want to mess with that?

Tags for this entry:
creativity, critical thinking, parent involvement, childhood

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