Child's Play
- Kathryn Porter
- May 25, 2017
- 3 min read
Here's another of my many confessions: Sometimes I just don't know how to play with my baby.
I try. I do. She's just barely hitting the stage where she kind of knows how to play, which is super fun and exciting...for about half an hour. Pretty soon I'm wondering... "now what?"
I can only play peek-a-boo so many times.
This scenario may be familiar to some stay-at-home mamas: We've played hide-and-seek around the bed. Several times. We crawled to each other, and giggled our guts out. Cute. But apparently not fun anymore. She played for a whole 30 seconds on her walker and then got bored. I carried her to another room with new objects to play with. She's bored again after 3 minutes. We've already played with all of her toys, gone for a walk, had nap time, eaten snacks, practiced walking around, and read a couple of stories...
...and it's only 11:00 AM!!!!!!!
"Sooo...what else are we gonna do today mom??"
I'm doomed for the next 7 hours...except it's really more like 9 hours because we all know that the last hours before daddy gets home are on 1/2 speed. Meaning they take twice as long. Meaning I have an ETERNITY of a day to fill with...I don't even know what. Add to that the growing list of things I need to get done, the guilt I feel for just "hanging out" for 10+ hours, and the slow degeneration of my frontal cortex from lack of stimulation...it's no wonder that I am basically sitting at the door at 6PM, like a lonely dog, waiting for daddy to come home.
4PM-6PM is my daily climb up the cliffs of insanity.
Annie's not boring, she's not. It's just....I don't know how to play with her in way that's fun for both of us for longer than 10 minutes. This is why "the days feel like weeks and the weeks feel like days," or however it is you say it. She's growing so fast, but apparently not fast enough to make the daily clock tick at a normal pace.
The new pace of my life in real time.
Yes, at times it feels like my life is a great, stretching expanse of quiet moments, moving at a sloth's pace. I'm learning, however, quiet is not bad. Slow doesn't have to be boring. These repetitive, small moments are not unimportant. Rather, in this stage right now, THE most important thing I can fill that great expanse with is Annie. And in the end I wouldn't it any other way. While she'll never remember the small moments of giggles and discovery---this time IS significant. In all of its simple, sloth-speed, repetitive glory.
SO how to fill my day with Annie and not go stir crazy? I pridefully always assumed I would just naturally be this super fun, creative mom--that we'd live in some sort of Mary Poppins world where we sing songs and play magical games and pull things out of handbags. Unfortunately I've discovered I'm actually really boring. Ouch. So--I'll do what every good millennial mom would do: Google it. Then ask the Facebook world. Help me out internet.
I did find some useful sites with some creative ideas of how to play with a baby this age. I guess being a good, attentive, FUN mom also means not being a LAZY mom. Got it. We will try some of these out and report back!
What else do you do to fill your baby's and YOUR day with good things?
コメント