I was given some advice yesterday, which unfortunately worked brilliantly :-( A friend told me that she found if she kept busy in the morning and clearing up and sorting stuff then she found her kids tended not to play up so much...so I gave it a try and hey presto, two beautifully absorbed and playing children, and one much more sorted house! I've managed to put loads of clean clothes away, unpacked and repacked dishwasher, emptied and refilled washing machine, did loads more reorganising of the playroom, and even managed to get lunch ready before they asked for it! Phew!
E is loving the new playroom layout and worked her way round most things during the morning. She went for 'bug rocks' to start with, which was a christmas present involving colouring in rocks and sticking stickers all over them, then gluing them to wings/legs other creepy bits of your choosing. She's reused them over and over, so they are a good fun! She then discovered all her old colouring and sticker books, so she went through them, and I had to do a page and she did one. She read me a book (I was told I had to pretend that I couldn't read, and that she was the teacher!), then she read some other books to her teddies. While I was putting clothes away I found a bag of freecycle clothes that a friend had given us to go through, so E did that, and decided what she would like to keep, and what she would share with her friend. I also found a stack of teeny baby clothes which had also been given to us for dressing dolls (my babies don't come in teeny sizes, so no use for bump!), so E set about collecting her favourite teddies from the playroom and dragging them all up to her room to dress them! That's been keeping her going most of the morning, and she's gone back to it this evening too!
H had a mega-long lie-in again, but once she graced us with her presence and had her porridge she set about exploring the new playroom layout, and came across loads of things that have always been above her eyeline, or out of reach, so she had great fun. She chose to play with our ancient marble run, a relic from my childhood that my mum lovingly saved!! We have a diverse collection of marbles ranging from extra large ones, to teeny ball bearings, so H spent ages first constructing her run with my help, then using regular marbles to get the idea, then started experimenting with different sized marbles, and exclaimed 'stuck!' when she used the big ones, and 'ooohh' when the little ones went whizzing down! She then constructed a shute to sent the marbles down into the run, but then couldn't stretch to reach the top, so worked out she needed to stand on a chair in order to put all the marbles in! Lots of problem solving!!
We spent the afternoon at a friends house, who had organised an indoor treasure hunt which kept the busy for a short while, but looked lots of fun! Then they all went out to play in the snow! Lucky things!
B is currently up in arms after a local woman apparently appeared on a local news website saying she had kept her children off school yesterday to enjoy the snow. She was slated by all and sundry for letting them miss a 'vital day of education'...what about having a childhood, and learning firsthand about our freak weather systems?!!!
6 years ago
Pah. When my kids were in school they'd come home having pushed a pencil across some paper and therefore that literacy can be incredibly boring and not much more than that other than theu usual stresses at lunchtime and we'd get loads of bumf from a whole department of employed people paid by my council tax in the civic centre called 'every schoolday counts'. They weren't allowed out when it snowed in case someone slipped and the parents sued.
ReplyDeleteGood for you tidying up. I've notice that when, ahem, my dh does that, the kids play better for a while as they rediscover things. Not sure what the secret of keeping it tidy is my kids are far too much like me in that department :-))
Someone in our local paper was slating the schools shutting and said their children were missing out on a day's education. Never occured to them that they could educate their own children on that day instead of leaving it to the teachers!
ReplyDeleteI think most schools round here were closed most of last week in the end, and probably going to be the same this week! Literacy rates will be dropping like stones ;-)
ReplyDelete