One of Maria Montessori’s more radical recommendations is to give your baby and toddler water in glass cups. Yes, as in a 6 month old drinking out of a glass cup. Real glass.

(Are you imagining sweet little baby feet surrounded by shards of glass? Stick with me here.)

We did (and continue) to do this with Bean, but I’ve found the glass vase of flowers (often found in Montessori classrooms) to be more interesting.

The glass vase sits on a low table, so a baby or child can easily grab it. In that way, it is clear that the glass vase is theirs — to look at, play with, inspect. So, I think the glass vase is even more radical than the glass cup, because it is truly a very fragile toy. The vase is obviously fragile. The flower and its petals are extremely fragile, and the positioning is fragile. If the vase moves into any other direction, the water spills and the toy needs to be fixed.

The purpose is to teach a child that some objects are fragile and need to be handled carefully. In our experience, it is almost like Bean realizes the inherent material difference and instinctively treats the vase much differently than her other toys — she has never deliberately thrown this vase, instead treating it like precious cargo. (And she’s a toddler, she throws everything.)

I first gave Bean a vase at around 6 or 7 months, when we started using her weaning table for eating. She couldn’t crawl yet, let alone lunge across the table, so she just looked at it. She didn’t have much interest in the vase until she turned one. And the first thing she did was tear the flowers apart, petal by petal, then stamen and pistil.

Not surprising, and I wasn’t sure if I should stop her to teach her the proper way to handle flowers. I let her go figuring she was expressing curiosity not being deliberately destructive (gosh, how sweet are just-1 year olds??) She got instant feedback — once a flower has been decimated, you can’t put it back together. She didn’t get upset, just a lot of baby confusion and a little furrowed baby brow.

And so I gave her another vase of flowers, explaining that flowers are delicate and we need to touch them gently. She started petting them, as we’d taught her to pet our cat. Her curiosity moved to the vase itself. She took the flowers out and upended it. Splash, water everywhere. In Montessori style, I helped her clean up the water, refill the vase, and put the flowers back in. I’m sure we did this a few times the same day, but I can’t remember.

But, that was it. I’ll buy her flowers and she’ll be quite happy with them on her table (“you’s flowers!”), but no more experiments. I bought a cheap vase from Ikea thinking it wouldn’t last long, and here we are over a year later. She might touch the flowers and inspect them, but always with keen sensitivity. She always picks up the vase like it’s priceless china — two hands, face full of concentration — and sets it back down gently. (Yes, she now has ideas about decorative vignettes and proper spacing.)

When a toddler is otherwise like an ecstatic, energetic monkey that has overtaken your apartment, tossing stuffed animal friends and careening into sofas without abandon, it is shocking to see them pause and deliberately handle something.

It is a glimpse into her ability to be a careful human being when she wants to be, a very nice lesson for the joyfully haphazard toddler years.