As we worked to experiment, with children, with how we might work to unsettle and re-create practices that affect how fat is conceptualized and made knowable in calculated iterations (Friedman et al., 2019; Rinaldi et al., 2021), we quickly noticed an immense absence of practices that deliberately burrow into the work of figuring out how to do or understand that we are and have bodies in early childhood. While we could name an abundance of strategies and narratives for teaching children about already-known ways to understand and care for their bodies (health, nutrition, self-regulation, exercise, hand washing), it became increasingly clear that in our context we did not know how to create opportunities to grapple with how to traverse and be engaged in the world with bodies that take up space, move, leak, change, fail, eat, bump, and sleep. While we shared with children, for example, the mechanics of how to blow a runny nose and why germ-filled tissues then needed to be handled in particular ways, the proposition of figuring out how to know, with children, bodies that feel tired, sticky, sore, and unfamiliar, or how to create meaningful body relations when bodies cannot not run as far as a few days ago because breathing felt more stubborn was both urgent and indiscernible. In our documentation, we gripped this gap of figuring out, together, how to get to know bodies as “what mattered pedagogically in what happened” (Berry, et al., 2020, p. 278); how do we get to know bodies with children is, for our work, a commitment to crafting body relations and knowledges that are affirmative, just, sustainable, and contribute to living well together in uncertain times.

In response to noticing that, in our particular context, we needed to work at figuring out how to ‘do’ bodies with children, we re-articulated our focus from directly interrogating and inventing relations with fat toward thinking about how bodies, muscles, and fat entangle and diverge. Our ethical and political commitments to countering anti-fat bias and crafting more just relations with fat with children remained critical as a backbone for the project.