This is not one of those 'howto' traditional craft posts and I'm not asking you to like the so-called snowman in the picture. I call it the little mutant and a sad-looking one at that. It wasn't made with Steemit in mind, but I decided to share his story with you because the evening spent with my son was a success and we're both happy with our little mutant.
The reason our experiment was a success is that it was the kid's idea, he came to me with this fake snow recipe found on the Internet and wanted to try it out. With me. Usually, it's the other way around. I come up with an idea and he gets to take part in my project.
If you think about it, this is mostly how education goes, whether we're talking about the school or the home environment. The parent and the teacher always know what the child should be interested in at any given time.
The need to be acknowledged
Say you want to teach your toddler to count - you open a nice picture book and start counting the cute bunnies – 'One, two, three'. At some point you will get the child to repeat after you, although maybe he'd much rather hop around like a rabbit. This pattern, established when they're very young, hardly ever changes and, although none of us are doing it on purpose, what it tells the child is that he is small and ignorant, so whatever ideas he might have are deemed silly and not really worth considering. When we shoot down a child's idea, even for perfectly sound reasons, we fail to see the big picture, what he's trying to say most of the times – 'Hey, I'm an intelligent human being, please treat me as such!'
As opposed to other Steemians living in warmer parts of the world, I don't feel the need to make fake snow. We're probably just a few days away from the first snow of the season and I'm not at all excited. My son knows what snow feels like, he gets to play in the snow every winter...but he wanted to try 'non-melting snow'. OK then.
Whenever I'm trying to get him to do something together, there's the 'hold it, I'm playing a game right now' or whatever excuse. When I said – 'let's see about that snow' he immediately dropped what he was doing and helped rounding up the ingredients.
That's where the fun part begins!
Recipe for disaster
The recipe calls for 1 part hair conditioner and 3 parts baking soda. Turned out there wasn't much conditioner left in the bottle and although we put in a smaller amount of baking soda, the mixture wasn't anything like snow. Couldn't even make a snowball. Back to the bathroom where we discovered some other hair treatment, but it was too creamy and rather oily. I was running out of ideas so I said 'What the heck, let's put in some shampoo, it's still for the hair.' The kid was delighted with all the commotion and with the bloody mess in the kitchen... Somehow, we did it – the product was snow-like enough, although quite crumbly. He was set on making a snowman, no matter what. He'd even prepared little bits of wood for the hands. (Thank God, I didn't throw them out as I didn't know what they were for!) The hardest part was finding a small hat for the poor creature and we again ran around the house trying to find something with a black cap. The hat in the picture is the top of my nail-polish remover so eventually I had to take it back from the little guy.
My son loves his snowman anyway and found a place for it on the mantelpiece among other Christmas decorations. If you look at the picture you'll see an old penguin, full of holes, but he got a place among the others because it was made by my son and he's proud of it. Just as I am proud of letting my son know his ideas are just as valuable as mine.
Kids need to be heard, not just seen. No, not just heard – listened to!
The best way to end the day – we watched a movie he'd heard about and found interesting. He could've watched it on his own, but he wanted to watch it with someone else and talk about it. Just as I watch shows with his older sister and we talk about them.
For a kids' movie it was rather decent, I must admit. (It's called 'A Dog's Purpose', if you're interested in a family movie night. Fair warning – it does have sad parts which drove my little one close to tears and he's not easily impressed!)
Unexpected bonus
Washing off the conditioner from the kitchen left the table-top sparkling. Also, there's a very faint, but pleasant aroma of coconut in the living room where the little mutant currently resides. On the down side, since it's non-melting, there's little chance we'll get rid of it anytime soon!
