One thing I love about parenting preschoolers is how tactile life is.
Children get a thrill from just ‘doing’ life; from taking out the recycling, mixing muffin batter, turning a tap on full blast. It’s like the opening scene of the French film Amelie, in which Amelie – all quirky and Zooey Deschanel-like – cultivates ‘a taste for small pleasures’ like running her hand through a sack of grain or cracking the top of creme brûlée. My children are the same. While I see a mundane task, they see a big bowl of burnt caramel and custard, just begging to be dipped into with a teaspoon.
Take going to the library. Recently my son, who is currently obsessed with whales (as I type this, he’s echolocating around his bedroom with a sheet over his head), wanted to borrow some books on marine life so we took a trip to the local library.
Even though it’s much easier to do my usual Google thing, there was something enjoyable about the tactile process of borrowing a book – with punching ‘humpback whales’ into the computer, writing down the dewey decimal code on a scrap of paper with a ballpoint tied to a piece of string, looking for the right aisle, then getting down on our hands and knees until we pulled out the books we wanted, the smell of thumbed pages thick in the air. It felt good and rich and satisfying. And it pleased my child to no end.
This pleasure is rare to find as we move into a world that’s largely digital. Perhaps it’s the reason why hobbies like colouring-in books and growing things in glass jars are in fashion right now – because we have this need to stay grounded in a world that’s becoming increasingly virtual; to rub our hands in grain and feel the nubbles and bumps under our fingertips … just like children do.
