Props to the Preschooler

Fiona gets a magazine called Ladybug (thanks Grandma!) which features various stories, poems and songs each month. There are some stories that run to several pages, some poems that only run to a few lines, and each month there are a few recurring features in comic strip form following the adventures, variously, of a boy and girl in preschool who are best friends, a pair of twins and their dog, and a girl and her cat (called "Molly and Emmett," and it appears on the back page of each issue).

Whenever Ladybug arrives in the mail and Fiona sees it she acts more or less the same way I acted when I discovered I got into my first choice college--she jumps up and down and can barely contain her excitement. Such are the pleasures of getting mail when you're not even four years old, I suppose.

Anyway, this month Ladybug was, not surprisingly, built around a holiday theme. When we reached the last page, we read about Molly and Emmett going to a Christmas carnival and finding the names of boys and girls who needed presents that year. Molly and Emmett each take a name (Emmett's a talking cat who walks on his hind legs, by the way) and find a gift and then wrap it and take it to the charity while talking about how nice it is to help Santa.

After we read the story for the first time, we had a talk with Fiona about what was going on in the story. We explained that some children didn't have as many toys as she did, and that what Molly and Emmett were doing was a nice way of making sure that no child had to go without a present at Christmastime.

We quickly realized that this was, as the parlance goes, a teaching moment, combined with an opportunity for us to do explicitly what we've been doing surreptitiously for years, which is to periodically clean out toys that Fiona isn't playing with any more.

We knew that if we asked Fiona to pick toys out of the blue to give to charity she'd either pick random items that would have no use out of context (the middle car of a three car train, for example), or else she wouldn't think quite straight and would suggest getting rid of a stuffed animal that was so beloved she wouldn't be able to sleep at night (yes, I know, the truest expression of the holiday spirit would be to give away the thing you love the most, but we're talking about a 3 1/2 year old here).

So instead, the night before we asked Fiona to make her choices, we laid out 12 toys and asked her to pick six that she would be willing to give to children who didn't have anything. She started by picking toys she absolutely wanted to keep, one or two of which suprised us. And, inevitably, some toys wound up in the "keep" pile, and then the "give away" pile, and then the "keep" pile. Halfway through I realized I'd better explain to Fiona that Mommy and Daddy were going to be giving things away during Christmastime as well, although I'm not sure that I did a very good job of explaining charitable donations to a kid who thinks you buy money at a bank. Still, I didn't want her to think we were just asking her to give away her stuff while we partied it up.

I'm not going to list what she gave away and what she kept since I'm sure one or two of her toys were former gifts from people who read this blog (on the other hand, if you still think a four year old should be playing with the same exact toys she played with when she turned two you might have expectations in need of adjustment). But Fiona did select six toys and even when she noticed that the toys were still sitting in our front room in a box waiting to head out for donation she didn't show any regrets.

So score one for the holiday spirit... and one for parents in a New York apartment managing to get rid of a little clutter. Analogies to scooping water out of a leaky canoe with a dixie cup might be appropriate, giving the impending arrival of Santa followed two weeks later by birthday presents, but at least we're still out there trying. And way to go, Fiona.