Auditory Manicure

Someone gave my daughter a fingernail file some months back.    The file was useful on one side for the purpose of filing nails or other unsuspecting objects with the back side was bedazzled in large pink glitter.    To the casual observer glancing over, looking at my daughter calmly filing her nails with streaks of sunlight refracted around the room from the glittered side, it would appear she knew what she was doing.   But they would be wrong.

My daughter knew I was working on my nails and she knows her nail file in a drawer in the bathroom.   She wanted to get her nail file and do her nails beside me.    I watched her with the file for a few—she knew one side was for decoration and one side was useful and had found the useful side.   But what she did with it was to file against the main body of the nail, not the edge where it’s grown out.    It was a logical, largest area type of thing to go for, and since she couldn’t see what I was doing  she winged it.

I showed her how to file the ends of the nails and told her to listen, that the longer the nail the higher a sound it will make as we file it down.   She got a pretty immediate sense of what that meant and asked me to keep doing her other fingers and then her toes.    When I started on a digit she’d listen and then tell me based on pitch if it was a long or a short nail.

When we were done with her file I asked her if she wanted to use the buffer.   What was the buffer, she asked?  I told her it smoothed things out and showed her how some of her nails were not shorter, but still edgy.

She liked how the buffer made a lower noise on each finger and how it was easy and fast and made everything feel nice and smooth.   We ran out of time and didn’t get to the nail polish stage, which she has planned for tomorrow.

The Big Boy Update:   My son is having some issues with being bossy.   I don’t know if he’s trying to help or trying to be in control but it basically doesn’t work because other children don’t like being told what to do by another authoritative small child.   Some of the time he is actually being very helpful, but a lot of it is so he can get his way.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter decided to climb up on her dresser today.   She found on a tall shelf the snow globe and music box Uncle Jonathan got for them several years ago.   She loved the music and winding it up.   The “snow” is silver glitter so I told her if she went out to the sun she might be able to see the flashes of light in the globe when we shook it up.   Once outside in the hot weather she shook the globe and I asked her if she could see the snow.    Yes, she said, she could see it, but that’s not what she thought was going to happen.  She said in a sad voice, “real snow globes are supposed to make it snow outside!”