"Richard Scarry's Busytown: Eye Found It" and "Please, Baby, Please"
On a recent Saturday, my older kid (she goes by N around these parts) and I had two hours to kill. Her sister needed to take a nap and there were three inches of rain coming down, so we were facing the chrono abyss that parents know all too well. What should we do with all that time?
Play games, obviously. We set up an intuitive and sneakily massive board game we got from the library, “Richard Scarry’s Busytown: Eye Found It.” Aside from its unwieldy name, it’s a smart little merger of “Chutes and Ladders” and “Where’s Waldo” set in Scarry’s anthropomorphic wonderland. It has a six-foot(!) game board that comes together like a puzzle, and there’s a simple goal: get to Picnic Island before some pigs eat all your food. To get there, you flick the spinner and either a) advance your pawn; b) watch as the pigs gobble up some food; or c) search for items hidden inside Busytown.
Two of those three were as relaxed as could be. The other filled N with so much time anxiety it had me questioning what terrible habits I’d passed on to her already.
All was fine when we started the game, which really is perfect for a 4.5-year-old not raised by a deadline-obsessed journalist. It offers an excuse to do some basic counting, beat some cute villains, and explore a densely packed fantasia of a town.
But then the spinner landed on Goldbug, a bug-eyed bug holding an oversized magnifying glass, and the vibe shifted.
Landing on Goldbug meant we had to look for the hidden items, and we only had 60 seconds to do it. We drew an item at random (a bucket), and each time we found one on the board it meant we could move one space closer to the food on Picnic Island. What a fun bonus!
Alternatively, what a stressful task! The moment the game’s minuteglass flipped over, N released guttural sounds of anxiety, somewhere between grunting and keening. We had to find as many as possible before time ran out or else … well, who knows. She’d fail? She’d miss out? She’d never know where all the buckets really were? Fueled by this adrenaline we found four buckets and got to Picnic Island before the pigs devoured our lunch.
Success! And it only took 20 minutes! Let’s play another, then?
“Can we play something calmer?” N said.
Calmer.
Like (I think?) many parents, I spend far too much of my parenting thinking/stressing about time. There’s only time for three Blueys in the morning, and only if we get dressed while watching it, and we have to be upstairs by 7:30 if N wants me to make lunch, and shoes have to be on by 8 if we’re going to catch the neighbor, etc. etc. etc. Much of that internal monologue leaks out of my mouth the way snot leaks out of my younger kid’s nose; all of a sudden it’s just there, out in the open, and there’s no way to put it back in. And whether I like it or not, people take notice.
But what else are we supposed to do? Parenting is an exercise in finding things to occupy your kids’ time, and then telling kids not to get too preoccupied because now they have to go do another thing. For us, time is something to be managed. For kids, time is something that barely exists -- until we force it into being.
All that force jars something loose in me, too. Some days it feels like all I’m doing is beelining toward the kids’ bedtime, without much regard for what’s transpiring while I get there. As any mindfulness acolyte will tell you, it’s hard to be in the present when you’re always thinking about the future.
When you talk about time enough, kids start catching on. N’s time anxiety isn’t just limited to Busytown. I see it manifest when we set a timer to clean up, or when she hears something might be closing soon. Part of that is about getting older, of course. Kids want to know how to map the world around them, and time is practically a geographical feature. But part of it, too, seems to be a reaction to the way I talk about time: like a miser who doesn’t want us to waste the currency we have.
As a friend pointed out, maybe this isn’t so bad: Time management is a life skill. But time anxiety is a life affliction. So, how to stay in the present so my kid can, too?
Maybe the answer lies in “Please, Baby, Please,” a beautiful and straightforward book written by the filmmaker/producer couple Spike Lee and Tonya Lewis Lee, and illustrated by Kadir Nelson, whose work you may have seen on the cover of The New Yorker over the years.
The book chronicles a day in the life of a toddler as her parents keep asking her to do something other than what she’s doing. Every page is a new plea, and the toddler receives them with as much obstinance as you’d expect.
“You share that ball, please, baby baby baby.” (She does not.)
“Now hold my hand, baby baby, please, baby.” (She will not.)
“Please don’t splash, baby baby, please, baby.” (She cannot.)
Depending on your worldview, it can be a book about the futile task of imposing structure amid chaos. Or it can be about the lure of rebellion in a world of arbitrary rules.
But for me, it’s a book about time and how to appreciate it. There’s an extra little easter egg on each page of the book: a little clock, showing what time each page takes place. When the toddler stops to pick a dandelion, it’s 4:30, but the mom doesn’t have time for it: “Don’t be so slow, baby baby baby, please.” When she puts her diaper in the toy chest -- “NO! In the trash, baby baby baby baby!” -- it’s 7:30, the diaper must be off because she’s getting ready for bed. You can practically feel the desperation for the day to just end already.
Two hours after she gets in bed, the toddler wakes up and inverts the story. She stands at the door of her parents’ room and asks, “Kiss me good night? Mama, Mama, Mama, please.”
On the next and final page, Mama tucks the kid back into bed. Their curls arc toward each other and almost touch. Their eyes are closed. The kid has the faintest hint of a smile. Mama gives the kiss.
There’s no clock anywhere in sight.
Our copy of “Please, Baby, Please,” came from one of my favorite used bookstores, Dove & Hudson in Albany. The book doubles as a great tongue twister for some readers. When my sister (hi, Abby!) first read it, we were hysterically laughing because she couldn’t get the “please baby baby baby” rhythm out smoothly. If you, too, want to laugh hysterically and/or appreciate the passage of time with your child, you can buy the book here. As always, I might make a small commission off your purchase, so please be careful how you spend your money.
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I really love this post, especially how you juxtaposed the experience of these two things (both of which I love -- Busytown was one of the only games I ever really enjoyed playing with my kids when they were tiny, maybe because I loved the Goldbug Mystery element, even though I ordinarily feel extremely stressed by time).