Creativity & Sense of Wonder

If there is 1 thing kids are really good at, its asking questions-A lot of them & often at very awkward times lol. They definitely know how to keep life interesting. Well, back when I was at the university I remember a comments a particular professor made that has always stuck with me. He said that ever child is born with this beautiful sense of wonder & it is us, adults, who
are so quick to snuff out that lil' fire & shut them down. Not intentionally I would like to believe, but it is so easy to accidentally do.  A child keeps asking questions & we might A) Respond with no real thought put behind our responses because its just "not a good time" or B) Just kind of shush them up a lil' bit because we have other things we have to do. It takes patience a lot of times on our behalf, but we can nurture this wonder in our children but encouraging them to think deeper & ask those questions.

We also can so easily ruin this imagination & creativity by putting our kids in a box. "Draw inside the lines" "Why don't you spread out the stickers more instead of putting them all there" or "No trees are supposed to be green". As parents we also tend to shut down right when we realize a mess could potentially be involved in an activity. But seriously, it is usually the messier activities that are the most fun, memorable, & educational even.

Yesterday the girls wanted to play with their water table. Immediately, my mommy mind thought of all the work that was going to have to go into setting it up & then the clean up afterwards. But I quickly caught myself, I needed to set myself aside for a
second. I thought about how much this lil' activity would mean to those lil'girls. So YES. I dragged out that water table, all the toys, laid out the towels to prevent slipping, filled it with water, & even added some bubble to elevate the fun level even more. I loved not only getting to watch the look in those lil' girls eyes as they poured their water from 1 cup to the other, but also getting to participate in the fun! And the clean up wasn't too bad.

If you look back into a lot of the childhoods of the most creative writers, actors, scientists, inventors, directors, & etc you will see a lot of times that the parents behind them didn’t rob their kids of that natural sense of wonder & exploration but rather found ways to facilitate it.

It takes a lil' extra, but we can do it!

-M&M Momma

I remember as I got older & would ask my mom questions about something,
she would take my interest even further by finding books & videos sometimes
to start empowering me to find the answers myself at times.