M&Ms

 

3 Years:

“Mama, all of these M&Ms have the number 3 on them. Why?”
“Because you’re holding them on their sides. Turn them around.”
“Now they say W.”

When I was a kid, I remember thinking that M&Ms were manufactuered on some sort of assembly line, where one worker (in my mind, an old woman in a matronly floral dress) had the job of delicately and carefully writing an “M” on every single piece of candy. It sounded like a hard job. I had no idea how it could possibly be worth all the effort, since, as far as I knew, the M added no flavor whatsoever to the candy.

I know that I’m not the only child for whom the “M” on M&Ms was a huge mystery. My daughter pondered them carefully, but tilted on their sides, so that the great mystery wasn’t the M on the M&Ms—it was the number three. Since she marches to the beat of a different drummer, then, even when she was gently corrected in her mistake, she turned them so that they looked like Ws.

Even after several minutes of trying to explain, and then show, that the M&Ms showed neither 3s nor Ws, my three-year-old just couldn’t quite grasp the idea that she was looking at an image different than what Mars had intended for her to see. At least it reassured me that she knows how to think outside the box.