Parental Dementia = Parentia??
As a mother, hormones and hopeless distraction combine to wreak havoc on one's mental faculties. It starts in pregnancy, when well-meaning books lead you to believe the condition is temporary, the result of a flood of progesterone and other magical baby-growing juices. I'm here to tell you it's anything but fleeting.
Yesterday afternoon, our preschooler and I spent some quiet time with the "literacy bag" we'd checked out from his classroom. The kit contained a book about a Nordic boy who lost a mitten and the ridiculous number of increasingly large animals who simultaneously took up residence in it. It also included storytelling props like the mitten in question and little pom-pom/pipe cleaner animals that the Active Older Adults from the YMCA had assembled. Associated activities like mitten coloring sheets and an animal memory game enhanced the experience.
After we "performed" the story a couple of times, it was the memory game that captured our little guy's interest. We shuffled the cards, set them up face-down in a grid, and proceeded to play.
Now, I don't know about you, but my approach in playing games with my son which involve any level of skill is to subtly handicap myself in some way so as to let him win a little better than 50% of the time. A perfect ratio in my mind is Big Brother 2, Mommy 1. It teaches him that winning's fun but that being a gracious loser is important, too.
That was the approach I took in our first round of Animal Memory. I lost by the narrowest of margins, with one fewer pairs than the champ. As we set the cards up to play again, I decided it was Life Lesson time and that I'd win this game.
The problem is, I didn't. And I was trying, at least for the second half of the game.
Now, I hadn't gotten more than six hours of sleep the night before, and it was wine-soaked sleep at that. Nonetheless, I hadn't counted on my winning being an insurmountable challenge. In my personal history, I have had a pretty remarkable ability to retain random bits of information. Do you remember that birthday party game in which you had 20 seconds to look at a tray of miscellaneous objects and then, five minutes later, a minute to write down as many as you could recall? I was unbeatable at that game! Now I'd be lucky to even remember five minutes later that we were PLAYING a game.
And I haven't even mentioned my trouncing at the hands of my six-year-old nephew when we played Blue's Clues Memory while we were camping...was a month ago? Two? It's all more than a little troubling.
As I was sorting through old magazines this week, I saw on the cover of the August 2005 issue of Parenting a headline for a story on getting your memory back. What does it suggest? Get more sleep, eat more iron, meditate, and...play games. So next time you see me, I may be sitting in the lotus position, wearing a sleep mask, gnawing on a beef stick, and visualizing myself doing the equivalent of the end-zone dance after I kick a four-year-old's butt at Memory. Maybe I'd be better at the Bob the Builder version. I've always liked that plucky Wendy...
Yesterday afternoon, our preschooler and I spent some quiet time with the "literacy bag" we'd checked out from his classroom. The kit contained a book about a Nordic boy who lost a mitten and the ridiculous number of increasingly large animals who simultaneously took up residence in it. It also included storytelling props like the mitten in question and little pom-pom/pipe cleaner animals that the Active Older Adults from the YMCA had assembled. Associated activities like mitten coloring sheets and an animal memory game enhanced the experience.
After we "performed" the story a couple of times, it was the memory game that captured our little guy's interest. We shuffled the cards, set them up face-down in a grid, and proceeded to play.
Now, I don't know about you, but my approach in playing games with my son which involve any level of skill is to subtly handicap myself in some way so as to let him win a little better than 50% of the time. A perfect ratio in my mind is Big Brother 2, Mommy 1. It teaches him that winning's fun but that being a gracious loser is important, too.
That was the approach I took in our first round of Animal Memory. I lost by the narrowest of margins, with one fewer pairs than the champ. As we set the cards up to play again, I decided it was Life Lesson time and that I'd win this game.
The problem is, I didn't. And I was trying, at least for the second half of the game.
Now, I hadn't gotten more than six hours of sleep the night before, and it was wine-soaked sleep at that. Nonetheless, I hadn't counted on my winning being an insurmountable challenge. In my personal history, I have had a pretty remarkable ability to retain random bits of information. Do you remember that birthday party game in which you had 20 seconds to look at a tray of miscellaneous objects and then, five minutes later, a minute to write down as many as you could recall? I was unbeatable at that game! Now I'd be lucky to even remember five minutes later that we were PLAYING a game.
And I haven't even mentioned my trouncing at the hands of my six-year-old nephew when we played Blue's Clues Memory while we were camping...was a month ago? Two? It's all more than a little troubling.
As I was sorting through old magazines this week, I saw on the cover of the August 2005 issue of Parenting a headline for a story on getting your memory back. What does it suggest? Get more sleep, eat more iron, meditate, and...play games. So next time you see me, I may be sitting in the lotus position, wearing a sleep mask, gnawing on a beef stick, and visualizing myself doing the equivalent of the end-zone dance after I kick a four-year-old's butt at Memory. Maybe I'd be better at the Bob the Builder version. I've always liked that plucky Wendy...
posted by Lisa Strandberg at 6:40 PM
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