 |
April
2004 |
 |
Magic
of 5 sprinkled with button fossils,
Easter Bunny maps |
| |
|
|
Today, I was unloading groceries from the car, and Liam,
5, was helping. He came into the kitchen as I was stuffing
bags of frozen vegetables into the freezer. Two boxes
of Cheerios were clasped tightly in his arms and his face
was radiant.
“Cheerios!” He was beside
himself with his good fortune. Just this morning, he had
been wishing we had Cheerios, and now, here they were.
As he continued unpacking the groceries, he shouted out
the name of each food item, followed by the name of the
family member most likely to appreciate it.
“Half
and half! Mom! For your coffee! Wow! I’ll let you
put that away. I know you love it. Jacob! Crackers! Here
you go! And bananas! We all love bananas!”
Living with 5-year-old Liam is like living with a human
shot of expresso. You wouldn’t think someone so
small would have quite so many opinions and approach all
of them with such passion.
Five is a magical age. Anything is possible for a 5-year-old
and those of us lucky enough to live with one should soak
up the magic while we can.
“I believe this
might be the fossil of a button,” Liam announced
earlier this afternoon, examining a small bit of plastic
he found attached to the couch. Actually, it was a hardened
dot of glue that had dripped from my hot glue gun, but
I didn’t have the heart to tell him. A fossil of
a button sounded mysterious and scientific, two attributes
I had never before associated with our family room couch.
Liam and his kindergarten classmates are newly hatched
in the world of childhood. Four-year-olds are still shaking
off the last vestiges of babyhood, but 5-year-olds have
been in the “big kid” camp for a full year,
and the result is bold confidence. They’ve mastered
eating with a fork, doorknobs, and printing their names.
What else is there?
Five-year-olds live in a place where God and the Tooth
Fairy exist in harmony, and communication with either
is easy and direct.
“When we go to Florida,
we will leave a map for the Easter Bunny,” Liam
informed me shortly after I told him of our family’s
plan for spring break.
Liam’s teacher, Mary Anne Mullaney, has been teaching
5-year-olds for 20 years and is unapologetic about her
bias toward them.
“I teach the best age,”
she says every year at the kindergarten open house. “Some
days I can’t believe I get paid for this.”
Parents who stop by for an afternoon of volunteering don’t
think she could possibly be paid enough.
“It’s
like herding cats,” an exhausted mom told me after
an afternoon of helping.
Tuesdays, Liam goes to my parents’ home in the morning
while I work. My dad started teaching him to play poker
a few months ago, and he’s caught on pretty quickly.
When my sister visited recently, she and her husband sat
down for a game of poker with pajama-clad Liam and Jacob
before the boys went to bed. After Liam was down for the
night, my sister told me there was something strange about
hearing him say, “Aces are wild,” and noting
the rustle of his Pull-up at the same time.
To me, that statement summarizes Liam — and 5-year-olds
in general. They can play poker, but they may wear a Pull-up
to bed. They’re learning to read, but Teletubbies
still has a hold on them. They can talk and reason, but
they aren’t beyond slipping to the floor in a wailing
mess of a non-verbal tantrum.
Five-year-olds straddle two worlds. Time and space are
liquid. To a 5-year-old, there isn’t much difference
between six days and six months. Both are impossibly far
off. Chicago and Tokyo are equal as possible travel destinations.
Self-consciousness is still evolving. One day, Liam is
horrified to be seen in his underwear by his 2-year-old
sister, but the next, I’ll find him on his bedroom
floor, naked, pushing a hot wheels car down a ramp, having
forgotten he was in the middle of getting dressed.
I’m not sure I saw the magic of 5 as much with Jacob,
our first child. Jacob, at 5, seemed old to me. At the
time, I could not foresee how different middle childhood
is from early childhood. I didn’t anticipate the
sudden jump in knowledge and understanding. I didn’t
know that the magic begins to fade as early as first grade.
But I know it now. And while it’s always a pleasure
talking to 9-year-old Jacob, firmly rooted in reality,
I’m enjoying the fossils of buttons and the maps
for the Easter Bunny while they still exist.
(Scobey-Polacheck and her husband Bill, have two sons,
Jacob and Liam. Their foster daughter, Teenasia, who had
been with them for a year, is scheduled to leave March
25 to the custody of her biological father. The family
belongs to SS. Peter and Paul Parish, Milwaukee, and St.
Monica Parish, Whitefish Bay. Scobey-Polacheck welcomes
dialog regarding her column. E-mail her at <ascobey@hotmail.com>) |
|
