One Inch World

There are a lot of fine motor activities going on around our house right now.

Here is Rebecca taking all the pins out of one of my pin cushions (is it a cute pin cushion, say a cupcake, that I made myself, no, it is a boring old standard tomato thing…) and sticking them all in a line in a block of styrofoam. She found the block of styrofoam, I gave her the pins, she created the activity. When she got tired of sticking the pins in a line we started stringing rubber bands on them to make an instrument. All because when she finds blocks of styrofoam I have to come up with something for her to do with them, otherwise they end up as a pile of styrofoam snow, which since I have a little bit of a plastic phobia I can’t stand! In this case the end was delayed, but not completely averted.

And here is Rebecca wiring up a breadboard to light an LED. You know, I’ve never ever wondered until just now why they were called breadboards, and I’ve been using the things for 20 years. Luckily I have the internet! Apparently early prototyping boards were often bread cutting boards with nails banged into them. Huh. I wonder if someone made that up? Anyway.

Since our house is blessed with plenty of electronic prototyping bits I thought it would be a fun fine motor activity to stick wires into a breadboard, and what to do other than light an LED? I colored on the breadboard first with permanent marker, trying to show by color which of the holes were connected to each other, then talked her through hooking up the resistor, LED, jumper wires and battery. We talked about how there needs to be a circle for electricity to flow, and if you break the circle by pulling out any of the wires the electricity will stop flowing. And we talked about how you can make yourself part of the current circle, and how that can hurt you. And of course even though it’s simple as pie the circuit didn’t work the first time, so we had to debug it with the multimeter, tracking it down to the battery not being all the way in the battery holder. Somewhere in the debugging we got out another resistor, so we also got to see how the LEDs got dimmer with a higher resistance resistor, and she also wanted to light both LEDs we had, so we talked about how they could both be part of the circle in parallel… But she’s three, really it was mostly motivation for supervised sticking of wires into little holes.

This is a work in progress from an embarassingly long time ago. How long? It has been stashed in a corner of my sewing basket through two moves now… probably unloved for almost 10 years. Why? Well, it was a fiddly pain, those pink squares are 1/4″ inch across. The whole thing is about 7″ across. What was I thinking? And then I got one of the stripes backwards and didn’t notice, so I had to rip a bunch out, and then I just gave up because the corners weren’t lining up. I think, it’s been a while so my motivations are a little hazy. Well, the corners still aren’t lining up, but at least it isn’t getting soaked in sewing machine oil anymore. I can’t say it makes a good doll house quilt, it’s much too stiff, but it makes an okay rug. Anyway, it’s done, so there!

There is a lot of sistering going on around here. Sometimes it is gentle and loving, but it seems like there is often a little bit of “I’m going to kill you in a very affectionate way so that mom doesn’t yell at me.” I haven’t figured out what to do about that.
I am constantly ‘reminding’ her not to blow in the babies face (to startle her), not to smush up her cheeks, not to touch the baby, however ‘gently’, with her foot, not to pick the baby up by her head, not to pick the baby up at all, not to jump over the baby!… Luckily I have two very sturdy girls.

I try to let Rebecca play with Penelope in any reasonable and safe way that she wants, so that she feels some sisterly ownership – like pulling her around in that cardboard sled (carefully!) And I’m trying to spend enough time doing things with Rebecca, but Penelope is almost always there, and when Jesse is home it is useless to have him take care of Penelope so that I can spend time with Rebecca, because when Jesse is home Rebecca would rather play with him. Because he’s better at playing dolls than I am. He is, really. I get too easily distracted by setting things up for the dolls, or trying to convince Rebecca to make something for the dolls, while daddy leaves the props alone and just sits there and ‘talks’ them and flies them around, and tells stories, which of course is the important and hard part. I got sidetracked, didn’t I?

I haven’t been posting, have I? I’ve been making things, and trying to play more with my older daughter despite the baby, and working on a little computer game, that I may post, but I’m not sure that anyone would care, so I may not.

What to do with a grasshopper:
Here is a grasshopper we found, except as we learned when we tried to find out what to feed it, it isn’t a grasshopper, it was a katydid. Apparently grasshoppers have short fat antennae and katydids have long slender ones.

We kept it in a jar with a cloth over it for a few hours, then let it go back on our porch. It didn’t seem to want to eat any of the plants we put in the jar with it, so perhaps it was the kind that likes to eat bugs. We have an entire insect ecosystem over in our worm bin, worms, flies, lots of pill bugs, and lots of spiders, so there is plenty of fodder on our front porch!