Units of time

While Julia has figured out how to avoid the blue tarantula at night by hiding under her blanket, she still hasn't gathered the courage to venture up into her room during the day. Last week when her friend Nate came over to play, he suggested they go up to her room and play with her matchbox cars, but she couldn't be persuaded. "I can't go up in my room because there's a blue tarantula in there, Nate." Over the weekend she asked me to come in with her so she could play in her room, so I did, but whenever I tried to leave, even for a second, she insisted on coming with me. So in an attempt to start getting her over this fear, I talked to her about an idea I had. Starting today, she'd go up into her room alone for one minute. Tomorrow we'll do it for two minutes. The following day for three, etc., until we could build up to large chunks of time during which she was in her room alone, without any blue tarantula bothering her. Who knows if this will actually work, but I didn't have any other bright ideas. She seemed okay with this plan, so today we tried for one minute. Julia happily trounced up the stairs, opened her door, walked in her room, and immediately walked out. "Okay, I did one minute!" she proclaimed triumphantly. I sent her back in, explaining that it had really only been one second, and I would call up to her when one minute had passed. So she stood in her doorway, one hand on the door frame, calling down every five seconds, "Is it one minute yet?" Now, obviously, like any child of this age, she has no real concrete concept of units of time. In fact, today she asked me if we could go back to Texas sometime, and this time stay for "eleven months. Or eleven years." So clearly the measurement of time is somewhat arbitrary in her mind. After the time had passed, and she asked why I did such a long one minute, I thought it might be a good time to try and explain the concept of a minute. I sat her on my lap and showed her the second hand on my watch, pointing out how it was on the diamond (which is at the top center in place of a "12".) I then told her we would watch the second hand (or the "moving line," as I called it) go around the circle, and when it passed over the diamond again, it would be one minute. I asked her a few times if it had been one minute yet, before the second hand was even close to the diamond, and she responded in the negative. Then as the second hand reached the diamond, I waited for her to say something, but got silence. "So has it been one minute?" I asked. Julia, clearly distracted by something else in the room and not paying my watch any attention, and probably feeling like a prisoner stuck on my lap for a tedious lesson, replied, "Um... not yet!" Okay, so my lesson failed, but I told her it in fact had been a minute because the second hand had passed by the diamond. So tomorrow I will let the second hand go by the diamond two times before I call her down from her room. We'll see how that goes.

In another feat of deductive reasoning, Julia called to me through the closed bathroom door, as she was doing poop on the potty, "Hey Mama, does "sun" begin with the letter G?" "No, it begins with the letter S," I told her, and after a moment of silent thought she said, "Well, Madeleine's shirt thinks it begins with G." I thought of the fact that today Madeleine is wearing a shirt that says "Puerto Rico," trying to figure out which letter could possibly resemble a "G" to her. "You can show me what you mean when you're done on the potty," I said, and when she came out, we both took a look at Madeleine's shirt together. Suddenly it dawned on me that the sun itself was what she imagined to be the letter G, and I have to say I can understand why:



I wonder why on earth this was what she was thinking about while cloistered in the bathroom on the pot, but one thing Julia has proven is that you never quite know what's going on in that head of hers...