By Jamie Etheridge
It started like any other weekend. Breakfast with friends at an outdoor cafe, our kids playing quietly on the grass nearby. Only when the quiet extended beyond the typical five minutes did I look up to see the entire lot of them, sitting in a circle, heads bent, mesmerized – up to their elbows in the once-widely popular habba (Arabic for trend or craze) that swept through kid culture in Kuwait: Rainbow loom band bracelets. One of the girls had brought her kit along with a bag full of thousands of tiny rubber bands in every color on the spectrum. All the girls and even some of the boys were diligently looming – creating multicolored bracelets for themselves and each other.
I have worked hard to cultivate a love of crafting, of crochet, knitting, weaving, creating with textiles and other types of art or crafting in my kids and was super excited to see my then six year old so focused and interested in making the loom band bracelets.
That night my six year old asked if I would get her one of the looming kits. I blithely agreed, saying that I would pick it up on my way to work. What a mistake!
The hunt begins
The next morning I passed by the toy shops on Khaled bin Al Waleed street in Sharq. The first shop had none, nor the second, nor the third. After checking the whole line of shops, I realized I might have misjudged how easy it would be to find these looming band kits. Once they were widely popular and ubiquitous but have fallen out of fashion in recent years.
On to Souq Sharq, where the staff at the Fantasy World told me they were sold out (in all Fantasy World branches) and wouldn’t get a new shipment in for anywhere between one to three weeks!
After posting a notice on Instagram and receiving an awesome response (Let me just say THANK YOU again to all the moms who offered suggestions or tips on where to find the kits!), I started calling shops. No need to name them here but let’s just say I called nearly every toy store, grocery and super market and several stationary shops in Kuwait. At all of these and several smaller toy shops in Salmiya, I got the same answer over and over: out of stock!
In total I spent about three hours searching for what are really just a bunch of plastic colored rubber bands.
It may seem absurd. But I think most parents will understand. The hunt for an elusive yet much desired toy really has almost nothing to do with the item in question and everything to do with not wanting to disappoint our children.
My daughter went with me to the toy shops. She understood that the kits were sold out and it was just one of those small disappointments. In the car on the way home, she told me: “It’s ok, mom. Life is life, huh?” The Generation Z+ way of saying ‘It is what it is…” I guess.
But as a mom, I couldn’t just let it go and I had no intention of giving up until I found one or ordered it online.
What we learned
Children need to learn to deal with disappointment. They also need to learn that they cannot have everything they want. The culture of immediate gratification is unhealthy. It is also unrealistic and sets up unfair expectations. I generally try to teach my girls to be patient. I teach them to save their allowance, to work toward goals step by step.
Still, the truth is I didn’t want to disappoint her. This is an emotion a lot of moms feel. We try our best. We go out of our way. We go above and beyond the call of duty not because we have to but because we want to give them the best. We want to make them happy and see them flourish.
Our hunt ended happily the next morning. I found the kits at a shop in Al Rai, a stroke of luck.
What I learned from the experience I’m not totally sure. She will get to practice looming. I get the satisfaction of meeting her desire, of encouraging her creativity. But how much did she benefit? That remains to be seen.
Update: Six years later my daughters still make loom band bracelets. My oldest, Safyre, taught her sister, Sabel, how to make the bracelets and both went on to teach themselves how to make cute animals, music notes and other designs with the loom bands using YouTube videos. The fact that they scaffolded their own learning by teaching themselves new designs and patterns via YouTube videos is perhaps the greatest thing to come from this experience…that and the many multicolored loom bands I now have in my jewelry box.
Originally published in Issue #19 of the Kuwait Moms Guide newsletter, October 2014.
Thank you for giving Saf the experience of “how to loom” and for that she teaching me how to loom and for the very fun experience