I’ve been thinking about my daughter’s sixth birthday in June and what sort of treasures a girl with big dreams and a love for frilly things might like. I know she’d love a pretty jewelry box to safely store all her treasures and she’s crazy about Barbies and a million other typical girly things. The other night, however, she surprised me with the most simple of requests. She mentioned that hubby and I had forgotten to bring home some boxes so she and Miss A could construct their own play train in the living room. This was something that had come up during the recent super tent construction in the living room. Miss C had wanted to build a tent, and the hubby made one that rivaled any I’d ever seen. It was a veritable fortress, fashioned with bar stools from our kitchen and an old wooden clothes drying rack draped with blankets and sheets to make a cozy lair to fill with pillows and stuffed animals.
I wonder how many times we unintentionally encourage our children to stifle their imaginations? At one point does it become “uncool” to make a fortress with blankets in the middle of the living room or a train from cardboard boxes? Miss C, especially, is at the age where she’s influenced by pop culture and the media. Her opinion is swayed by her friends and she is developing her own inner barometer of what behavior is acceptable and what is not.
My brother travels to Thailand now after Christmas and lives there for most of the winter. He sent this sentiment in a recent e-mail:
I read an interesting commentary on why life seems to speed up as we get older. It is from a speech by Ani Tenzin Palmo—an Englishwoman, who at the age of twenty became the first Western woman to be ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist monk. I read a good book of hers called Cave in the Snow, about spending twelve years alone meditating in a cave way up in the Himalayan mountains—she now runs a center for nuns in northern India.
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