There are found items – and then there are ones you find again. Which feel pretty much as good, as it turns out.
There is an obvious mismatch between what kids want weekends to be about, and what parents want weekends to be about. Parents’ thoughts tend to drift towards savoured cups of coffee, reading, quiet – and preferably getting up later than on a week day.
Kids’ thoughts around the weekend tend to ignore the getting up at the same time bit, but it’s fair to say that lots of time to play and have fun would be high up the list of what to do at the weekend.
Time to try out the cunning plan devised a couple of nights ago. I put together some items in a basket, put them upstairs, and left a note on the table for Junior Player to spot at breakfast time.
Clay might not sound like one of the things that brings on parental calm, but Junior Player had been doing some clay activities with Granny Jen over the summer, and there was a nicely worked lump of play left.
There was a little ‘oh!’ and then a ‘can I…?’ Because the right kind of found item is just as inviting the second time round.
Junior Player picked up again at the same spot as before, and completed the model as planned. It didn’t seem to matter that there had been a couple of months in between times.
The thing is, the week is full enough. Full of activities – full too of new found items to bring home. And often in all this fullness, the things we already have, that are good, get forgotten about.
The basket is the start of an attempt to do something about that. To get past the maternal ‘why don’t you play with what you have?’ and make it easy to say yes to things that you actually want your child to have a chance to do.
So now the clay eyeball monster is complete, and also has its own bed. We might even get it painted.
But I think I will forgo the lie-in for that one.