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.

Fear of Spelling

3 Years:

“Mommy, I’m scared.”
“What are you scared of?”
“I’m scared of trying to spell the word ‘Fantasia.’”

Despite my endless amount of pride and my faith in my daughter’s genius (don’t almost all of us have delusions about how bright our kids are?), my daughter didn’t somehow possess a magical ability to spell difficult words when she was three—nor did she have the dexterity to write very clearly. She was, at least in that regard, a fairly typical three-year-old. She could write her own name, the word “Mama,” and the word “love,” and who really needs to write much of anything besides that, at three?

But, even more than I was delusional about my daughter’s genius, she was delusional about her own ability, too (as you’d expect from a kid that age). The series of random letters, to her, always spelled out whole and complete paragraphs. The random lines and shapes nearby were elaborate, photorealistic illustrations. Every piece of paper that touched her little fingers was a masterpiece.

Despite the fact that she wasn’t “really” writing yet, she was fixated on trying to do it correctly, and would, sometimes by chance, manage to write a cluster of letters that was almost the correct spelling of a short and simple word. I didn’t really focus on this too much, because she was three and she didn’t need to be able to “actually” write. But I also didn’t really discourage it, either. Any educational way to pass the time on a rainy afternoon sounds good to me.

The downside of this game of spelling was that perfectionism was built into it. It wasn’t enough to spell the word “cat” and get it nearly right. She wanted to write something much more interesting and elaborate than that. Specifically, she wanted to know how to write strange name of that movie that Mama got from the dollar bin at the thrift store.

I guess I would have been afraid of spelling “Fantasia” at three, too.