Chicago's Oak Park must have had something in the water. In the latter part of the 19th -early 20th centuries it was a hotbed of ideas and strong mothers. It was home to Ernest Hemingway as well as Frank Lloyd Wright. Both of these men had pretty impressive moms. Frank's mom determined early on he was going to be an architect, even before he was born so the story goes. And in his early childhood, she purchased some froebel blocks for his play.
If you want your child to be the next Frank Lloyd Wright then you can access this webpage
http://www.shopwright.org/blocks.html and nurture her/his interest.
Ernest Hemingway's mother was another force. Just Google Ernest Hemingway's mother and you will bring up tons of really nasty stuff, but the thing that impressed me most about her was her radical kitchen design. If my reading of his biography was correct, she was one of the first people to incorporate built in kitchen cabinetry as well as the idea of a "work triangle" in her home. Her theory was that to be efficient, a kitchen's work spaces should be able to be reached without walking all over a huge room. She was farseeing enough to envision a time when people wouldn't have servants or time to spend trying to locate things.
Of course now, we've gone backwards and our kitchens are looming large again even as we are eating out more.
Here's a link to the tour of Wright's Oak Park
And here's Papa's link
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