Rainbow loom meltdown

 

Happy new year! Here's my first post of 2014 on Today's Parent, on my own and my son's matching Rainbow Loom meltdowns:

... in theory, one could create any number of things on the Rainbow Loom, assuming one had the manual dexterity of, say, Glenn Gould. For the rest of us, in particular the six-year-olds among us, mastering the Rainbow Loom is freaking hard.

I discovered this when I sat with Isaac on Christmas morning and we attempted to make the first, very basic, anyone-can-do-it, bracelet. We were fine actually getting the elastics onto the loom. But when it came to hooking them over each other, things deteriorated quickly. Isaac would try, as hard as he could, to stretch one band over the next, only to have it pop off the loom, taking with it several of its multicoloured friends. With each mishap, he grew more frustrated.

“It’s hard, honey,” I kept saying to him. “Learning new things is hard. It’s OK not to be good at things right away. You’ll keep practicing — you’ll get better.”

But he didn’t want to keep practicing in order to get better. He wanted to be good at Rainbow Loom right now.