I had found this picture on Pinterest and thought it would be an awesome activity for A. He loves being creative and building things, he'll sit for an hour straight playing with Lego and I really thought these would be a fun thing for him to explore. Well, it didn't quite go to plan.
For starters, the sticky backs of the velcro wasn't quite strong enough so often when he'd pull the two sticks apart the velcro would come off the stick as well. He would try to gather a bunch together in his hand but then they'd just all velcro together and he'd have to pull them all apart so he could use them, but then we'd have the same problem with bits of velcro coming off again.
Then he started thinking that the velcro coming off was part of the game and started ripping the velcro off and sticking it on the table, on his face and the floor.
I'd decided to allocate only 10 minutes to the craft sticks so that he wouldn't tire of them and they could be something special I bring out once a day when we sit down together. Well it hadn't even being 5 minutes before I quickly moved onto the next activity since we were both starting to get a bit frustrated.
The next activity went a bit better. I had found these coloured dot stickers at the newsagents and decided to do a colour sorting game with A. He had a coloured piece of paper for each colour sticker and I thought I would start off by handing him a sticker at a time and ask him where it goes. I braced myself and prepared to launch into a futile explanation of "See, this sticker's blue so it goes on the blue paper" with a not-quite 3 year old as I handed him the first blue sticker.
"Where does this one go?" I asked.
To my amazement he looked around at the different sheets of coloured paper I had placed in front of him and promptly placed the sticker on the blue paper.
"Dere!" he announced proudly.
To my increasing shock he proceeded to place 3 more stickers on their correct papers. After the first round I gave him the sheet of stickers and told him to go ahead and finish the sheet.
Once I saw how well the game was going I decided to allocate 5 minutes before we'd move onto something else before someone got bored.
The game lasted approximately 1 minute, 4 more rounds, before A handed me back the sheet of stickers and announced he was going to watch TV. Sigh.
After that I thought I would give him something to do which was a bit less educational and restricted. I'd found this idea on Pinterest too. I gave A a couple of colanders and a bunch of pipe cleaners and showed him how to thread the pipe cleaners through the holes and how to bend the pipe cleaners to make different shapes. I left him to play with them while I went to the bathroom.
I came back to find that he'd taken all of the pipe cleaners out of the colanders and stacked them all back up neatly, ready to be put away.
I was nearly ready to give up at this point and it had only been about 10 minutes. So I thought I would do something that he was bound to be interested in and brought out a small box of Lego. He was quite content to sit there creating for about 10 minutes before I gave him lunch and sat him in front of the TV :(
This afternoon went much better. A has his nap from roughly 11:30-1:30, he woke up today at about 2, and we straight away got ready to go to the playground just up the road.
I decided to walk around the long way to get there, and halfway there we realised our naughty dog, Ditzy, had decided to escape the yard and join us. We live in a very dog-friendly neighbourhood so we decided not to return her to the house and continued on. It actually turned out really well because when we got to the playground we made multiple games out of chasing Ditzy and having her chase us.
A was able to burn off plenty of energy, we played lots and lots of chasing games with him chasing Ditzy, him chasing me, me chasing him, me holding Z pretending to chase him, lol. He also went up and down the slide plenty of times.
I've decided the design of our local playground totally sucks. It's raised (as most of them are to accommodate the slide), but the way to get up on it is via a very steep (going straight up) ladder which younger kids can't go up on their own, so rather than letting your toddler run around and play by themselves on the playground equipment while you watch you need to be there assisting them every step of the way. I don't mind helping out a bit, but after 15 minutes straight of playing chasies (yes, I'm very very unfit!) I was absolutely exhausted and just wanted to sit and watch as A burnt off more steam. I had to come up with some other games for him to play so I could sit for a few moments and have a rest.
We left after about 45 minutes and walked back home, this time we went the extra extra long way, walking the entire way around our suburb to get home. Then, just as we were going through the gate at home A suddenly realised we'd left the water bottle at the playground! I contemplated just ignoring it and going back the next day to get it but since you can actually see the playground from our gate I finally sighed and decided to get it. We took the direct, 2 minute walk back to the playground lol.
By the time we got home and I made A an afternoon snack and a cup of tea for myself it was already 5pm! So we had a more chillaxed evening just watching Lego videos on YouTube before having dinner and starting the bedtime routine.
Well I must say that despite the rough start to the day I feel like I was really productive today. I really enjoyed our time at the playground, I'm definitely going to try and do that at least 3 times a week.
I knew, going into this, that it may take awhile to get into the more structured activities with him, especially since he isn't used to them at all, and I'm going to have to play around with a few things to work out what works and what doesn't. Hopefully by the time Z is ready for these activities I've got a better routine in place!
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