On Dec 17, 2004, at 21:30, Ruth Budge wrote:
Because it's actually very hard (and I speak as a mother of three here!) to
ease a small child's fingers into gloves! Young children don't seem to
have the manual dexterity to fit each finger in each hole, or even the
mental capability to envisage which finger goes into which hole....so you
end up with a child who's managed to put the thumb in the thumb-hole OK,
but who has then managed to insert the second finger into the third hole,
and the third and fourth fingers into the fourth hole, and who have a finger
left over, with nowhere to go - or some similar mess!!!
Sure you do; and keeping you in mittens till you're 10 or so makes it even more difficult to slot a finger into its appropriate hole when you move on to gloves. Since the Blessed US *had* gloves sized for 3yr olds available, that's what I got for my son. Before then, you couldn't keep *any* covering on his hands longer than it took to lock the door :) After... He'd slot in wrong, and I'd say: "Whoa! Back up and try again", and he would, because I'd have mine on, and each finger in it's own "casing". "Whoa" works on a horse, doesn't it? And a horse is supposed to be about as intelligent as a 3yr old?
Mind you... I had only the one, not 3, so could spend the time teachin'. But then, so did my parents...
The *only* advantage of mittens over gloves, from my point of view, is that 4 fingers bunched together are warmer than each being separate. But, in that case, why not just a ball-like thing, which houses all 5 (4 fingers and thumb)? You see mitten-shaped (thumb separate) hand-coverings on baby-sized snowsuits. Do you think they *keep* their thumbs in the "scheduled" slot (always supposing you can separate it from the fist and stick it in <g>)? Mittens, for warmth, make sense only among consenting adults :)
--- Tamara P Duvall http://lorien.emufarm.org/~tpd Lexington, Virginia, USA (Formerly of Warsaw, Poland)
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