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.