Creation of the Quiet Book

Over maternity leave i decided to create a Quiet Book for Henry. It's comprised of soft felt pages and everything is either tacked in with glue, Velcro, snaps, string, or sewn in. And let me tell you...there was LOTS of pieces to tack in. 

The majority of the pieces were hot glued or sewn in really well to make sure that they could withstand lots of toddler pulling and picking....cause if it's one thing toddlers do best, its to fiddle with things until they're destroyed completely (not unlike puppies actually🤔). Since there was a ton of sewing and hot gluing to do i had to work on the book while the small child wasn't around during the day, which only left when daddy took Henry out for a few hours or when Henry went down for a long nap.

I tired to include a range of learning potentials (learning colours, numbers, life skills etc) for later on, but for now Henry will just be very textile as well as looking at pretty colours. 

The rundown of pages/learning: 

• Textile page (buttons, a snap, velcro, yarn, zipper, sponge, rubber shapes)
  
• Matching colours
• Matching Shapes
• Abacus w/ beads
• I spy with my little eye 
• Right v Left
• Big to Small shapes
• Learning colours
• Counting
• Moods Page
• Name page
• Learning how to dress
• Laundry/washing pretend play
• Braiding Hair
• Tic Tac Toe/ Noughts and Crosses

It was quite a feat trying to fit in all the little pieces, lots of cutting felt, gluing, drawing faces, making 'clothes', sewing in sections... but I finally finished it! And already henry has fun flipping through the thick book like felt pages and feeling all the little intricate pages mommy hand crafted for him. Whether or not he uses it as it's intended for learning as he gets older will be another story entirely. 

One of the sections I debated on was something I would never have thought about consciously before: What colour felt do I cut out for the faces?  Up until a few months ago, it wouldn't have been a question and I would have automatically just put in a beige felt face. Thanks to the massive media hype around Black Lives Matter, I've been putting in the time to think about my world view, how I can broaden it, and what I can do to change things. 

One of the things I learned from actor Mehcad Brookes was that change starts with the collective consciousness. In the simplest terms, to make outward change, we first need to change the way people think. Everyone has unconscious bias about a myriad of things--these are things we have an innate opinion about because it's been made socially normal through our upbringing. A few good examples of that would be: 

• Different jobs men hold or women hold (ie: Men are doctors, Women are nurses. Men are Builders, Women are ballerinas)
• Gender Stereotypes (Boys play sports, Girls play with dolls....or Women should be pretty, men should be strong)
• Cultural Misconceptions (Spanish people are Lazy, Canadians are too nice, the British don't care about dental hygiene, Germans are humorless, Jamaicans love getting high, etc)
• Thinking all people over a certain age are frail and incapable of looking after themselves
• Racial Bias (Black people are great at sports, white people are racists, Asian people are intelligent, Hispanic are illegal immigrants, etc)

I've been challenging these social norms and stopping more to think about them--"okay, well why is my first thought X, can it be Y instead?" Breaking the cycle of these 'social norms' and allowing room to grow is a big part of changing the world.

So, whilst I was making my Quiet Book and I had a few pages that would feature faces I thought to myself...I would normally put in little white boy faces because Henry is a white boy. But could I do it differently? 

The answer was undoubtedly YES! And why not? At the moment Henry's exposure to people of colour will be minimal because 99.9% of the people he sees on a daily basis are white-mummy, daddy, granny, granddad, mummy/daddy's close friends, Nursery carers, etc. I can't control outside factors--what people say or do concerning POC, but I can control how we in this family treat the issue of it. So that Henry can see that diversity is normal and 100% okay (hopefully to counteract any outside negative influence) I'm making efforts to grant him positive exposure to things he wouldn't normally come across. 

I'm firstly leading by example by checking myself (and Rob) for any lingering bias and correcting this behavior so Henry can't copy it. I'm making more effort to buy culturally diverse books, including some amazing finds from independent authors so that he can have an array of protagonists to follow and learn about some of the amazing cultures that the world has to offer.  And, I've opted for NOT putting the face of a pale blond girl (which is what my default would have been) to braid her hair in Henry's quite book. It's a minor change and it doesn't really matter who's hair is getting braided but it's one opportunity to diversify Henry's 'feed'. 

Now on to my next homemade project for Henry--The dreaded 3 page cross stitch that will take forever to complete. I'm hoping that I can at least manage the bottom half of the cross stitch by the time we start marking Henry's height. I'm back to work full time now, so that may be a pipe dream. 

More about returning to work in an upcoming blog. For now, I'm signing off!