Education or Day Care?

When parents go off to work they are preoccupied with finding quality day care for their kids. It is curious that very young children, learning at a rate that will never be equaled in their life-times, are seen as "being taken care of" instead of being educated. When I look back to when Julie and Andrew were very young, I grow pensive when I remember their day care while Anda and I worked. But now I have the opportunity to educate my twin grandchildren and after the first week I am both excited and humbled by this opportunity. There is a learning curve here, because although I have a lot of experience with five to twelve year-olds, two-year-olds are another proposition. So the first few weeks are a discovery process... These are the rules of the chalk art, as established by Nate. He takes me by the hand and leads me to the asphalt driveway. He points to the driveway and says, "You sit here papa. Now you wait here," he says, and he walks with his sister back to the chalk pail, chooses two colors and returns, draws a few lines on the driveway, then repeats the instructions and returns the chalk for two more colors. Back and forth for 30 minutes, with Libby picking up on the instructions and adding a few more admonitions and comments, like the inevitable, "I'm back!" Getting the twins to sleep is a work in progress. We pick them up and wheel them down to 8804 Barnett at eight in the morning. Sometime after 11:30 they are ready for a nap. But how that is to be done? We have tried the idea of, "OK, lets go lie down in your room on your beds for your nap." Good luck with that! I have heard that some kids go docilely along with such requests but I have as much success for that napping procedure as I did when I tried it on Julie and Andrew more than twenty-five years ago. A ride in the car or the stroller, however, results in sleep within fifteen minutes and a nap of one to two hours long. Thank you God!

I am reminded of how Sarah and Ema described their attempts to get Julie to sleep when they took care of her in her toddler days. "I would get so mad at her," Sarah would say, upon returning with a sleeping toddler on the stroller, only to have her wake up when arriving at the house.
Toddlers are very good at associative learning. They are piling up new words every day and have no trouble pointing to a map and finding continents, countries, oceans and rivers. The rule is "keep it short and quit before they are ready." This rule stands for any activity. If there is no smile on their faces, then what am I doing? Here Libby points to the map and says "North America".