March 23, 2009
Fostering Your Child’s Interests
We don’t do everything right as parents. We see flaws in ourselves, and know that there are lots of things we could do definitely do better. But, we do feel that one thing we’ve done well so far is fostering Caleb’s interests—albeit his offbeat interests.
When he was interested in airplanes, we took him to an airshow. When he started asking question about where the stuff in the toilet went, we visited the waste-water treatment facility For a while he was on this kick about meat-eating plants so we attempted to grow a venus flytrap and pitcher plant habitat in our living room. Once put a jar of caterpillars on our kitchen counter and watched them spin cocoons and break out into butterflies. We’ve also taken tours of the “Money Factory”, the Hyundai manufacturing plant, a dairy farm, a peach farm, and the Mayfield dairy processing plant.
When he’s on something we know we may have a dozen library books on that topic at any one time. I mean just tonight at bedtime, I read him a kids book at bedtime about how the study of bionics is being applied to artificial limbs. Very fascinating. Who knew they had kids’ books about this stuff. I’m learning right along with him.
Most of their best learning takes place miles away from the books and classroom. For example, for the past several weeks workers have been repaving a road we travel on every day. These big asphalt paving machines are to him what caffeine is to me. So yesterday (Sunday afternoon), we happened to see where they were parking these massive machines, so we thought, well…why not?
We never set out to do weird things with our kids. It just sort of happened. His little mind is all over the place. Why just today, he asked Tiffany, “Are you ever afraid we’re going to run out of gas?” Tiffany responded that she wasn’t afraid because the fuel light will come on if we ever get low. Caleb said, “No I mean our country. Are you afraid our country will run out of gas?” That led him to talking about solar and wind powered cars. So maybe our next trip will be to a natural gas platform out in the gulf…oh wouldn’t we all love that!
