What would happen if you handed over the day to your three year old?
No really.
Within reason you would follow their lead.
I say within reason because there will be some interesting suggestions and requests that would cost far too much or just not realistic. But what would really happen?
Our children don’t have a lot of say in what goes on especially if they are a subsequent sibling. Let’s face it we don’t always design our days around our children. We all have things to do and the impromptu sit in at 8:30am on the way out the door is enough to send us over the edge on a tightly scheduled day.
But what if……we had a long session where we did what the three year old wanted…..at their pace.
Instead of us saying, ” Alright let’s do…… ( insert your activity of the day here).” We said, ” What would you like to do now?” and then you did it.
Visualize your home, what do you think your child would do? Where would they want to go? What would they ask to eat?
Activities that happened when we did this
- We played lining up cars for a long time. However we did sort them by colour, size, group them in twos and threes, balanced them on top of each other to see how many we could stack, made letters and numbers, tried to create the longest ever traffic jam
- Painting- we reproduced activities we had done recently and listened to music. We also experimented with water seeing how wet we could get the paper. How quickly we could get the water to go dark? ( quickly!)We realised we like poster paints because we can load up our paintbrush Watercolours took too long to do big long lines. Clearing up is fun when you can play in the water while cleaning the brushes and paint pots.
- Snack of Nutella on toast with milk. Blueberries roll of the table if you don’t put them down carefully. Some blueberries are squishier than others and mummy must eat those.
- Lining up cars never gets old
- We read a pile of books and snuggled.
- Ignored the phone ring ( that was hard!)
- Read some more.
- Phone rang again. This time I took the call.
- Playing with a balloon- batting it to each other, rubbing it on the wall.
- Finally the LO brings me the container of flour- I’m not sure if he wants to bake or play with it. He plays with it by himself as I clear up the kitchen.
What I learnt
