Jeremy Rothman-Shore Blog

For more than a year, I have been letting my kids pour their own cereal and milk with the idea that some day they would be able to get up on their own in the mornings.  Letting your two-year-old wield a half gallon of milk or tip a full cereal container upside down to pour it into a bowl takes an iron stomach, but I have stuck with it.  I’ve mopped a lot of spills, and we go through much more cereal than a family of four has a right to, but I figured it would pay off some day.

This morning, quite unexpectedly, my master plan fell into place.

At 5:50 am, my daughter whispered into my ear, “Daddy, get up!  We want breakfast!  Let’s go downstairs!”

Our kids, Ayelet (age 5) and Rafael (almost 3) had wandered into our bed around 5:30, but instead of going back to sleep, they were flopping around, singing,  and otherwise making a major nuisance of themselves.  These pre-6am wake-ups have been going on for more than a week and half for no reason I can determine.  As usual, I was pressed against the edge of the bed with my head under the pillow, trying to pretend to myself I was still sleeping.

When my daughter said she wanted to go downstairs, I knew the jig was up.  My wife had gotten up with them the last two mornings, so today was my turn.  I prepared to get up when I was suddenly struck by an inspiration.

Two weeks ago, my wife and I agreed that we could disable the safety locks on the cabinets and drawers in the kitchen.  They already know how to press down the drawer locks to open them, and they haven’t had much interest in the cabinets that hold fragile items like glass measuring cups.  My son has even figured out how to use the magnetic key to open the snack cabinet if he can get his hands on it.  At this point, it was just an inconvenience for us as parents, so we decided to try removing them.  Well, except for the knife drawer.  Even I’m not that foolish.

The kids handled the unlocked cabinets without incident, so we left them that way.  I hadn’t thought about it at the time, but this opened the door to execute my secret plan.  In the bed this morning, with my daughter trying to get me up, I had an inspiration.

“Ayelet, why don’t you go make your own breakfast today!  You and Rafael can go pour your own cereals!  Um, just be careful not to spill it!” I suggested.

After a moment’s hesitation, Ayelet got excited by this idea, and if she’s excited, her younger brother will generally go along.  As they marched downstairs, I remembered that the bowls were in the upper cabinet.

“Wait!  You’ll need to get the step stool and climb onto the counter to get the bowls!”  I told her.  My kids are very adept at setting up the step stools and climbing up to the counter when they want to help with the cooking, so I was quite confident that they would have no trouble with this.  Hey, I’m the guy who lets his two-year-old pour his own milk.  I’m fearless.

As they went downstairs, my wife asked me if I was crazy.  She was convinced that we were going to have an enormous mess on our hands.  There was a pretty good chance that she was right, but I said, “Have faith.  Let’s see what happens.”

For the next ten minutes, we listened to the bumps, clanks, and muffled conversations as our kids moved around the kitchen downstairs, setting up their own breakfasts.  A few times Ayelet came up to consult on this question or that, but it sounded like they were making progress.

Finally, she yelled up that the milk was used up and she needed help opening the new one.  As I got up to go downstairs, my wife recommended I take the wet wipes down to the kitchen to clean up.

When I arrived, I found my faith was well placed.

The kids had set not two but four bowls, one for each family member.  They had poured cereal and milk, and they had gotten spoon for each place setting.  They had also provided biscuits and graham crackers and poured a glass of water.  Cereal was in the bowls and not on the floor, as it should be.

Four bowls of cereal and milk, four spoons, biscuits, and glasses of water, all on their own.

It was really quite civilized.  And they did it all by themselves.

I was shocked.  Even in my wildest dreams, I had not expected such a successful…and clean… first outing.

The funny thing was that once it was all set up, they decided to go upstairs to the third floor and play.  They never bothered to eat.  I had to cajole them to come back downstairs and eat with me to get them to actually have breakfast.

I suspect that a big part of this elaborate breakfast preparation was the novelty.  Because they were on a big adventure, they were working together and taking great care with all the details.

I have no doubt that tomorrow they will refuse to go on their own, or if they do, I will have that big mess we were all expecting.

But now I know for a fact that they can do it.  They day where both parents can stay in bed while they make their own breakfasts are in reach.

“Daddy, you don’t have a very good brain!” my daughter reprimanded me this evening during bedtime.

I had skipped a sentence while reading her bedtime story, and she had caught me red handed.

She went on to explain to me that I missed some words, and I should have said”‘I think it is time for you to go to school now’, said Mother.”

Sure enough, that’s what it said.  I stared at her, flabbergasted.

The last step in our bedtime routine is that each kid gets to pick a story for me to read to them.  Usually, this passes without incident, but there is occasionally a negotiation when one of the kids picks a story that is just too long for an expedient bedtime.

At the ages of almost three and five, my kids still like to hear some stories over and over, so reading a long story night after night can get very tedious.  Even really well written longer stories like Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney can start to drag if we don’t mix it up a bit.

But the real bane of my existence is the Frances book series by Russell and Lillian Hoban, particularly Bread and Jam for Frances.  It tells the story of a badger named Frances who refuses to eat anything but bread and jam and her parents’ struggle to get her to try new things.

Bread and Jam for Frances is a loooong book (picture from Barnes and Noble)

Now, as the parent of some very picky eaters I can relate.  But it’s so…damned…long… and my daughter Ayelet absolutely loves it.

This isn’t one of those picture books with a few sentences per page.  It has whole pages with nothing but text interspersed with occasional pictures.  There are two whole pages devoted to a detailed accounting of how Frances’ friend Albert eats a five course lunch.  I kid you not.

I swear I would have no trouble telling this story in 1/3 the space.  And to be truthful, I sometimes do.

On the nights that I cannot manage to steer Ayelet away from it, I have taken to playing a bit of “editor”.  There is a lot of needless dialog, and since she can’t read yet, she doesn’t really notice if I skip a sentence here and there as long as it’s not key to the story.  And there are a lot of these sentences.

So, when I agreed to read Bread And Jam again tonight, I was unprepared for what happened next.  She immediately started making corrections.  I would skip a line and she would immediately point out my mistake and tell me what I should have said.

At times, Ayelet’s memory amazes me.  She can rattle off details about a house we visited on a trip over a year and a half ago, and she could recognize every letter of the alphabet before the age of two.  I had always assumed she would be an early reader, but she never showed much interest in putting the letters together.  She has learned several sight words  at school, but she is nowhere near advanced enough to be reading this book with me.

My best guess at this point is that someone read the book with her earlier in the day and so it was fresh in her very good memory.

If not, an absent minded father like me is going to find himself in a lot more trouble as she gets older.

When I wrote about introducing my daughter Ayelet to legos a couple of weeks ago, a friend suggested I take a look at GoldieBlox.  The idea was to design a construction toy set that was geared towards girls and finding ways to engage them in building.

Created by a female engineering grad from Stanford, the idea behind the toy was to build a story to associate with the blocks.  As the child read or listened to the story, she could follow along and build the same machine as the character.  The theory was that for girls, having a story would provide some purpose and narrative to the activity, while boys might generally be more interested in construction for construction’s sake.

I’m not expert in gender psychology, and I know there is a broad range in both boys and girls, but I could see how my daughter might very well become more interested if there was a story behind the project.  Plus, GoldieBlox was a small scale kickstarter funded project, and I wanted to support the effort.

Production was still ramping up when I placed my order at the beginning of March, so it it took about 8 weeks before arriving on my doorstep yesterday.  When my younger son Rafael went down for his nap, I took advantage of the one-on-one time with my daughter and pulled out the GoldieBlox.  She was immediately attracted to the bright pink box and eager to start.

The pink box was a hit

As it turns out, the story that comes with the blocks was not much of a story at all.  For no apparent reason, the character of Goldie Blox decides she wants to build a spinning music box for her dog, and then eventually a bunch of other animals want to spin too.  It’s not particularly clear why, and it failed to capture my daughter’s interest in a story, which was supposed to be one of the central ideas behind it.

The pink ribbon and rubber animals held her interest, despite the lack of a real story to go with them

Nonetheless, my daughter liked the rubber animals that she could attach to the posts, and she was excited by the pink ribbon that causes the spindles and animals to turn.

GoldieBlox, fully assembled

With my guidance, she made it through all of the steps to the end of the story.  The toy is intended for ages 6+, so she is just a little too young to do it on her own and needed some help figuring out how to wrap the ribbon to make all the spindles turn at once.

The “story” of GoldieBlox ended, but there were some more pictures of other creations you could make.  However, at this point, Ayelet was ready to be done and asked if she could go watch TV.

Shortly thereafter, Rafael woke up and came into the living room.  He immediately saw the GoldieBlox board and said, “What’s that?”

Rafael immediately gravitated to the GoldieBlox

He proceeded to start playing with the board, turning the spindles and pulling on the ribbon to make them turn.  We didn’t discuss the story, and he was only vaguely interested in the rubber animal characters.  He wanted to pull off and reattach the spindles.  It just naturally held his attention.

My sample set of one boy and one girl is vastly insufficient to draw any conclusions, but it does fit in with the stereotype of boys being naturally more inclined to build and assemble with blocks.

I think GoldieBlox has a great idea of using a story to engage girls in building, although I must say that I had hoped for a more engaging narrative.  I had assumed that Goldie would have to some how build a contraption to solve some larger problem that my daughter could relate to, whereas the actual reason for the building seems rather arbitrary.  Also, the “advanced activities” are all about making interesting designs, for which the moving ribbons and spindles seem rather extraneous.  But these are easy criticisms for me to make on the sidelines.  The challenges of building an affordable product and concise enough story to fit into a printable book are huge, and I don’t know that I could do better.

I did notice that someone clearly put some thought into the modularity of the board.  I spotted some holes in the side that would allow spindles to be attached horizontally rather than vertically.  After dinner I showed Ayelet and Rafael how we could attach spindles to the top and the side to create an elevator for the rubber animals.

Using holes on the side, I showed the kids how we could make an elevator

Rafael liked turning the crank, but my daughter enjoyed making the animals go up and down.  A different approach for each of them.