Tackling the Tangled Slinky

3.5 Years:

“Mama, you have advanced fine motor skills. Could you please untwist this Slinky?”

There are some pains of parenthood that you’re never warned about. No one tells you how much it hurts when you step on a Lego or a Rainbow Loom late at night. No one tells you just how disgusting it is when your child vomits onto your face. No one can prepare you for the tedium of helping with elementary-school homework. And no one—absolutely no one—explains the futility of attempting to untangle a Slinky.

When she was around three and a half, my daughter went through a phase in which she was absolutely fascinated by my ability to paint fingernails, open cans, cut with scissors, and write clearly. When she asked why she couldn’t do those things, I explained that adults have more advanced fine motor skills, so it’s easier for them to do things with their fingers.

Unfortunately, advanced fine motor skills or not, there isn’t a person in the world who is capable of untangling a Slinky without a lot of hand-cramping and cursing, usually ending with a twisted knot that gets thrown into the trash.

Liopleurodon

3 Years: “I have a bunch of little toy extinct reptiles. I have… a Parasuarolophus, a Brachiosaurus, an Apatosaurus, a Compsugnathus, a Maiasaur, a Pterosaur, a Dimetrodon, and… OH MY GOD. I don’t have a toy Liopleurodon!” 

My daughter’s second-longest-lasting obsession was with dinosaurs. For the better part of a year, she lived and breathed dinosaurs, and it took only a month or two before her level of knowledge outpaced mine. She could tell a Chasmosaurus from a Triceratops, a Deinonychus from a Velociraptor, and a Stegoceras from a Micropachycephalosaurus. (The fact that she could say “Micropachycephalosuarus,” alone, was enough to amaze me.)

Of course, the thing that made this phase especially amusing and adorable was the number of scientific-sounding Latin syllables she blurted out in what was, to her, completely normal conversation. This one little gem of an observation arose when she was playing by herself and taking a census of the creatures in her toy collection. I ordered her a toy Liopleurodon that day, even though I first had to use Google to figure out what it was and how to spell it.

Diamond Fish

28 months: “Tiny little pink robot diamond-fish…”

I’m not sure where she found the tiny little pink robot diamond-fish. I didn’t know we had one. But there it was, held a few inches above my kid’s chubby face as she guided it through the air in a swirling, swimming motion.

It looked, by the way, exactly like a dull screw. If I hadn’t been informed of its true identity, I could have easily mistaken it for a tiny piece that fell out of a toy, or perhaps a piece of furniture. Luckily, thanks to my daughter noticing the fact that the screw was in fact a tiny little pink robot diamond-fish, its rarity did not go unappreciated.

Children are imaginative by nature, and it might be humanity’s biggest tragedy that we lose our imaginations as we age. I’m not the only person who remembers suddenly, at around twelve or thirteen years old, not being able to figure out just how playing in the rain worked, or what was involved in make-believe, or how it was that my stuffed animals ever seemed alive. And when, in my twenties, I observed the “tiny little pink robot diamond-fish” that looked exactly like a dull screw, I realized that there was no way that my grownup brain could have looked at it and seen anything besides a screw.

Creativity is the most beautiful thing about childhood, but we take it for granted and we don’t encourage it nearly enough. For every broccoli floret that becomes a tree, every firefly that becomes a fairy, and every screw that becomes a diamond-fish, I can consider myself to have earned another badge in parenthood.