The Three Year Old Who is Also a Baby Brings Us and Me So Much

We have a boy with significant and global developmental delays in our group. He is a delightful almost 3 year old who is developmentally close to 1. He is happy, motivated and very friendly. He brings so much to the group every day. This is what he brought to me today.

This little guy has learned to push over chairs and stools and finds this to be interesting and important work. He must do a bit of it each day. While three 3 year olds put together a restaurant, he takes the 4 blue stools and knocks them over one by one. It takes time and planning. But eventually this task is accomplished he starts his sensory activity of rolling around in the cloth covered foam blocks. He chews on them, he crawls over them, he sings. He is smilingly, gurgling, giggling, happily engaged in his world. The sensual delight is enviable. I mean enviable.

Right near to him in the same room there are three 3 year olds making a restaurant. I am struck with the amount of matching and counting they do as they agree or disagree about what to put where on the table. They are engaged in the verbal and mathematical skills that we love so much and depend upon so much in our culture. It is a delight to behold the ways that they are growing as a small threesome, and as future adults who will all attain professional status within the next couple of decades. I am always stuck at how the ‘math’ and ‘language’ and ‘pre-reading’ skills of preschoolers just jump into their play on a fairly continual basis. I am watching them thinking about this. Thinking about how lucky they are to be in a program that allows this to happen, where the adults notice and remember what the kids know, and are learning. Where the adults take the time to watch and note the progression they all make in this march toward being ready for kindergarten as well as for life. In short I am lost in my own intellectual reverie. It is pleasurable. I find intellect to be a pleasure.

The group is aware of the ‘baby’ as we call him, and he of them, but they are not playing together. But when the table is set it is time to get the blue stools and set them up too. The ‘baby’ notices and heads over to the restaurant at a quick crawl. Soon one of the chefs is complaining that the ‘baby’ is “ruining our food!” And sure enough he is.

I reframe. “I think he is your first customer!” We set him up at the table and he eats his hamburger, and all the other food they have set out so carefully. Complaints come in again. I reframe again. “How about we set him up at another table?” But the older children have abandoned the restaurant. They are rolling around in the foam blocks. They are laughing and giggling and feeling the sensual delight of being a child with other loved children in a pile of foam blocks. Can you remember it? They still have that door between intellect and sensuality on a quick swing. Soon they are building beds. They compare and quarrel a bit about who gets more blocks than the other, who gets which color, who gets which bed, what game are they playing anyway. Once again they move into the intellect that we value so much. I delight in their ability to learn how to talk to each other, listen to each other, present ideas, change plans, follow and lead, focus, shift focus, accommodate the needs of others, organize and do countless other of the small actions that really form the basis for successful human interaction and engagement.
But this brings me back to what does this little boy with developmental delays bring to us. For me today it is simply the reminder of the sensual pleasures of life. Be here now. Michael is off at yoga. I sit with a glass of red wine at the window. The green trees blow in the spring wind, I remember that sensuality that I am surrounded by on a daily basis. I try to grab for a memory, a sensual memory of when I was simply a sensory person, back so many years ago. This guy reminds me of the constancy of his senses. The wonder of a life that wanders oh so slowly toward the intellect. The awareness of the pleasure of this kind of a life. The reminder of why we run this daycare in the ways that we do. To allow kids this wander toward the intellect, and the myriad vacations from it that they take. To let them lead this process and take the vacations they want. To value so totally this reprieve from adult life that they have now and only now. They deserve to enjoy it.

The 3 Year Old Who is Also a Baby Brings Us and Me So Much

Hair Cutter Man

He is in his 80's or even older.  He is a recently moved in tenant at the senior housing adjacent to the park.  First time he came he teased a certain 3 year old to tears about wanting to come into his house to take his hair at night.  Talk about terrifying to a 3 year old.  I talked him down, and we went to talk to the guy. Turns out his name is Joe and he worked at a local gas station till very recently.  Last time I bought gas there he tried to charge me twice.  When I told him I had already paid I saw a look of pain in his eyes.  Clearly he was aware that he was forgetting things.  Now he lives in this senior housing, new to this immediate neighborhood. But anyway, this little boy and I talked to him and  together we realized that he was teasing and wouldn't really come in at night and cut his hair.  Joe even took off his hat to show us that he had hair of his own, not much, but enough.  Much talking with the kids and their parents reinforced this sense of safety with this guy and his 'funny' joke.  

 

Over the next couple of weeks all the kids at the park made friends with this guy, who they call Hair Cutter Man.  He stays out of the park, but the 3, 4 and 5 year olds run around the fence close enough to allow Hair Cutter Man to fake grab at their hair.  Loads of fun.  Lots of practicing being brave.  

They started to just call him The Funny Man.  Yesterday  they all started a new game.  The kids would throw balls out of the park and The Funny Man would run across the street to retrieve them, even crawling under cars parked in the lot there.  I thought this had several potential problems so I asked the kids to stop throwing balls over the fence.  This is a rule we have anyway.   Somehow it seemed undignified to me to have this guy do this chore for the kids.  

 Next they start throwing shovels out of the park for The Funny Man to collect.  It is always hard to tell who is having more fun, Joe or the kids. Joe of course could have the fun of pretending that he wouldn't give them back.  And then there would be one kid who would believe it and cry.  Probably a 2 year old, or a particularly worried 3 year old.  I didn't like many aspects of this game so I put a stop to throwing shovels out of the park.  

A few minutes later I see a 3 year old throwing a Hula Hoop out of the park, and just about hit this 80 year old in the face.  I told them that they couldn't throw ANYTHING out of the park.  Being resilient they reverted back to the game of running along the fence for him to steal their hair.  

Today the kids are digging a huge hole in the sand and filling it with water that collected in every container from the rain that fell last night.  Along comes Joe.  Such excitement!  "The man is here!"  They run over quick as a wink and catch him at the fence.  How does this feel to Joe?  Jeez, how would it feel to me if I was 80 or more and just landed in senior housing?  It would make my day to have the friendship of these kids.  It would be the delight of my life.  

So today they have a new and very clever scheme.  The 5 year old boy, who is a natural athlete bounces the ball right at the gate and bounces it again till it bounces close enough for Joe to grab it.  Joe throws it with all his might and the kids go running.  They bring it back and all work on this job of mastering just the right bounce.  All happy.  And my rules of yesterday are all being followed.  There is a certain decorum to the play that works out well for all.  

It warms my heart to live in this neighborhood where all this can happen in the lives of these kids, and of Joe.  Young and old becoming friends.  Who among these kids will remember Joe when they are older?  A mystery.  But today as Michael and I were taking an after daycare walk, along comes Joe.  We joked with him, "Watch out!  We're gonna cut your hair!"  He laughed and took his hat off to show us his hair, and was on his way.  So were we.