that the last entry in this blog wasn’t September last year, eh?
Today we were rained in and had no petrol to go anywhere, so all four kids were looking set to trash the house all day. To make things even better, Mr Bat was working from home, so I felt some sense of responsibility to keep them at least marginally under control. H kept running up to his room and bashing on the door demanding cuddles. When I was having a Grumpy Mummy Moment and yelling at him to stop (which of course only made him want daddy cuddles more), I listened to my Good Angel for a change, and switched gears to reconnecting with him and validating how he felt. We ended up drawing a diagram about how even though H is sad about not getting daddy cuddles when Mr Bat is working from home, Mr Bat working = money = all the nice things H can think of. He actually got it after that, and went off cheerfully to tell people about his picture.
After that success, I figured out that giving the kids nothing to do and then rousing at them for being noisy and bored was probably counterproductive, so I set up a bunch of table activities and they rotated through that for an hour or two. I put out some wooden beads in a muffin tray for sorting, and added the small tongs for fine motor practice. I had some coloured pots out for the counting bears, but nobody was interested in sorting by colour – they made excellent bear caves though! D and H did a bit with the threading shapes and chunky beads while K made necklaces with the smaller beads. Then she spent quite a long time making people with felt and glue and dolly pegs, while D really got into the Batty Lizards and H played with the felt faces. After at least an hour of solid concentration, they started getting bored and wandering off, and I suggested pulling out the dress-ups and play silks in the living room.
K came back to the kitchen a bit later and put on a puppet show with her dolly pegs (a retelling of Sleeping Beauty) for me and H. They went off and watched some iView on Mr Bat’s computer, but K was playing too violently on his swivel chair and he removed her from it, so she came in to me in tears. I suggested getting the sewing machine out and making beanbags. She thought that was an excellent idea (she’s been asking to do more sewing for a while) so we got out my box of kid fabrics and she picked some. I did the cutting out, she did the straight seams, then we filled them with soy beans and I sewed the last seam. D came out at one point and liked the idea, so he picked his own fabric and I helped him make two for himself. We ended up making eight all up, and they got played with a bit. Kids also got stuck into the Duplo. Eventually (thank FSM!) it stopped raining so they went outside for a while, and I flumped! It was a very long day…