Boxes, books, buckets and the back yard.
I am fairly certain, but before you ask, no, I don't intend to try, but I can still be mostly positive that if you took all my children's toys away and left them with just boxes, buckets, some books and the back yard, their smiles wouldn't fade.
I know this is sounding all idealistically soppy, and I don't mean it to be, truly, I don't.
You always hear people say "The kids love the box the toy came in more than the toy itself."
Its true.
Of course, the integral ingredient tying it all together is imagination. Children and their ability to sail through worlds without leaving the washing basket (ok, there is another one) or the cardboard box is simply amazing. It is a pity we lose that.
I am not saying there should be a world of Peter Pans. There is clearly a reason why we mature, our responsibilities change, we learn worlds of information and have clear choices to make in order to embark on our own life's journey.
Lately I been feeling like things are getting way too overcomplicated. Like children's toys. I am not going to start the "back in my day, we only had half a banana peel and a bean peeler to play with and we turned out ok..." speech, I promise.
But I genuinely feel like some of the things children are bombarded with is killing their imaginations.
In Melbourne, Leo played soccer in Camberwell. Now there is a nose-in-the-air bunch of people if I ever came across them. I used to say to Ash how people think poor people's children are deprived and these Camberwellian types are the ones with all the privileges for their taking. True. They have everything they could ever want. At two and three, they have never known what it is like to drive in anything other than the latest Vovlo or BMW, or to go from soccer, to ballet, to music lessons, to swimming and to one-year-old kinder. But I used to wonder, if you gave them a box, what would they do?
Leo and I were on the outer there to begin with. There were quite a few large differences between 'us' and 'them'. Our commodore wagon looked pretty out of place in the carpark to begin with and when we went to soccer (which Leo adored by the way) we went to get involved, and I would find myself getting more miffed by the week at trying to scramble through the legs of the natting mothers to retrive Leo's ball to do the next activity. The coaches used to have to ask the MOTHERS to be quiet so they could give the next instruction, not the kids.
Leo would try and interact with the other kids. He would run around with them and turn the lines on the stadium floor into train tracks, or the division between the sand and the water at the beach, the other kids would just stare at him blankly as if to say 'what is wrong with you?' 'they are just lines.'
There is no doubt that I experienced those first few heartbreaking parent moments at soccer. But the coaches loved Leo so much and he loved them and the activities, so in the end, we just went for us, a couple of times we went for coffee with the others and tried to see things from their perspective and 'fit in' I guess. But it was clear we were different and came from a whole different place to them and in their place they were simply unwilling to see the world from our point of view.
I got the overwhelming feeling that their children went to soccer so they could say 'my child goes to soccer' rather than actually going to soccer with their child.
Anyway, my point is, through that glimpse of that sort of (I am trying not to overgeneralise) inner-city child's life I came to realise that an overcomplicated life of someone so young can seem to kill the person they may have naturally have been through their own personality developing, rather than conforming.
Sure. It is easy for me to sit back and make judgements, having had the luxury of both the city and country living and by no means do my observations apply to all children living in the city, in fact I know some particularly amazing city-living children with wild imaginations and incredible personalities. In my experience, it seems to come down to the amount of time and encouragement allowed to a child to become themselves.
We have a rule. There is one set of AA batteries in the house, they rotate between the battery operated toys. You might be thinking 'oh great, one of those high-and-mighty-deprive-th
Bunnings had buckets on special for 84c each. Leo asked if he could have one, sure I thought, so I bought six. Buckets, I have come to discover are great. They are drums, enough for the bigger and the smaller drummer so fights are kept to a minimum. They are useful to put things in as Eeyore would say. Lots of things, even little sisters fit with a little coercion. Put one on your head and you are a robot. They make good seats. You can throw things in them, like pairs of socks. Somehow they are also spaceships and the roller that Grandpa drives at work.
I marvel at how simplified things have become since our move. I worried so much over having to explain to Leo why we no longer went to soccer, play centres, the Aquarium, the city, the shops, McDonalds, on trams. Don't get me wrong, he wouldn't have swapped those experiences for the world. But over the near three months of country living, just once he has asked to go to Big W. We went out the back and planted spring onions instead, he didn't mind.
A child's imagination is an incredibly amazing thing. And it seems that boxes, books, buckets and the back yard are on the top of the list for my two imaginative beings. I wonder where it will take them tomorrow.
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