I spend a lot of time cleaning, which I have mixed feelings about. I want to have a clean house so that the boys have a safe place to play, but I don't want to spend so much time cleaning that I ignore them. I usually compromise on this by:
- cleaning where ever they happen to be playing, ie. sweeping when they're driving cars around the dining room, folding laundry when they're playing in the living room, wiping down the bathrooms when they're asleep because those are no-play zones in our house
- having them clean with me
When I say I'm not very good at playing with them I mean I kind of stink at building with blocks and Play-Doh and drawing. I can do them, but my architectural repertoire is sadly small and I run out of ideas pretty quickly. I'm good at the make-believe stuff though, so usually as the boys are playing I'll sit in their room and talk to them while they do the playing. Often I'll have a project in hand so I don't fall asleep (is that a normal concern?) and I'll ask questions about what they're doing or about the things Peter is telling me about his cavalcade of invisible friends. I'm there with them, but I'm not really playing.
On Monday though, I really played with the boys. Peter made a train out of the dining room chairs and we sat in our cars and rode the rails.
Our chair trainAnd it was really fun.
2 comments:
That does sound like fun. :)
I think reading is play. I still like to play in that sense. However, not as much as I did when I was in fifth grade. One day I checked out a new book from the school library. I had only a few minutes to read during the library period, just enough to get really interested in the story. I tried to read the book as I was walking the five blocks home, but walking was too bumpy to read smoothly. So I sat down on the grassy median between the main street and the frontage road that led to the street where we lived. I read with my back against a telephone pole until it got dark (about 5 PM). You can imagine how upset my mother was. I still love to read, but not with the intensity and stamina as when I was ten.
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