Admittedly, I was quite worried that, in true toddler fashion, my daughter would want nothing to do with her nature "buggit" this week and my posts would be quite disappointing. Thankfully, at least as of today, I had full participation!
One of our favorite places to go is a nearby "greenspace". It's a very simple concept. Basically just a small grass field, a couple wooden benches, and a mulched area with native plants and some tree stumps. There is no traditional playground equipment, yet there is so much room for play!
My daughter's favorite thing to do when we arrive is sit. She saunters, in true toddler fashion, over to the mulch area and plants her little patooshka right into the debris. I am instructed to join her in the mulch, so I plant my not-so-little patooshka a few feet away and watch her work. She starts sorting through the various objects within arm's reach and comes across a very impressive piece of bark. "Buck!" she announces proudly. I ask her if she would like to put the bark into her basket (I know what you're thinking, Rule number 4!!!?...) and she replies "Aaah!" (which means yes).
Interest is quickly lost in this particular area of mulch, and my daughter gets up and begins to explore on top of and around the stumps. I watch her closely, as she is a bit over-confident in her climbing skills these days. She falls anyway and acts as if this was completely intentional, shuffling through a new area of wood chips. She then stands up triumphantly and holds out a new treasure as she walks towards me. "Kick!" she exclaims. And this time... "Buggit!" No prompting from me! Now the little green basket holds a large piece of bark and a smooth, bark-less stick.
Apparently she has had enough of the mulch, because she takes off into the grassy area, giggling her latest fake giggle, which I am sure she learned from my husband. It is very similar to the laugh of a minor character in a muppet movie, a sort of "shish shish shish" through a very cheeky toddler grin. I follow her into the field, and just a few steps in, she bends down again and retrieves something from the ground. She turns again to show me her latest find. "Kick!" She says, with a jubilance that implies this kick...oops I mean stick... is just as individually special as the first, and deserves equal fanfare. I widen my eyes, smile, and hold out the basket (no, really, this is not breaking the rules!) and she walks over and plunks the stick inside. With a closer look, I see this stick is quite different from the first. Very long, thin, and knobby. It reminds me a bit of the wand a Hogwarts student, perhaps a not-so-minor character, might have used to defeat the dreaded Voldemort.
Another three steps or so and my daughter is down again (intentionally or not, it's hard to tell these days). When she rises, I can already see what she's holding, and there is a trend forming. Another kick! Just as excited this time as all the others, she wields her latest nature-loot so euphorically that I must intervene (no eyes will be lost in the making of this blogpost!). I congratulate her on her keen collection skills and "help" her place the stick into the basket (okay...that one might have been bending the rules a bit...). The wind has now picked up and I begin to calculate how many sticks are between us and home. I offer what I feel is a fair choice: continue playing or head home to eat some macaroni and cheese (which just so happens to be my daughter's absolute favorite food). She chooses "muck schiz", much to her mother's relief, and we start our hike homeward.
When we get inside the house, the nature basket is tossed on the rug and two hungry tummies scurry to the kitchen for some much deserved muck schiz. It isn't until much later, after she's gone down for her nap, that I revisit the basket. I am struck by the simple beauty of each of the objects. Upon closer observation, I see how each of the sticks is so very different and special. The third stick, which I neglected to really make note of, is half bark-covered and half bare. Though I hesitate to project too much, it honestly seems as though my daughter was doing her own little observational study on bark! Perhaps it's just coincidence, but the correlation is uncanny. First bark, then a bark-less stick, then a bark-covered stick, then half and half!
As adults, it is so easy to take for granted the many (thousands? millions?) of categories we have formed in our heads to help us make sense of the world. From birth, children have the task of taking the buzzing confusion that is the world we live in, and turning it into something that makes sense. Categorizing is one way to make the process easier, and kids do it without ever having to be taught. Perhaps you know a young child who called every animal they knew a dog, until they started to hone in on what makes a dog different from other animals. This specific type of categorizing is called "overgeneralizing" and is quite common when children are first learning to speak. Though linguistically the child is applying a more specific word to a more general group, the child has formed a category nonetheless! This innate ability to observe and categorize, along with the vocabulary provided by those around the child, allows for a perfect learning lab, and continues long after childhood has commenced.
Today, I was lucky to return to the child's world of classification, and my daughter was my teacher. She reminded me, once again, how infinitely beautiful the simplest things can be, and demonstrated, in a simple and profound way, the amazing workings of the mind of a child.
