by Kate from An everyday story and Rachel from Racheous.
Oh, I am really falling behind following this series. Being a part time working mum does not allow for as much time spent with your children; and sometimes the days spent together are all about attention seeking.
For creating playdough invitations for this series, I decided to address Mr A's current interests (insects and vehicles). Miss R is always happy to join in, still being at that 'I like to eat playdough and make mess' stage - she likes to squeeze it, make balls and throw them around, and finally put some in her mouth.
A couple of days ago I presented freshly made playdough on perspex mirrors with some fresh rosemary and dry larch twigs, wooden beads and plastic butterfly toys. They both loved it.
Mr A created two different forests with butterflies resting on the ground and cocoons hanging of the branches. This carried on into making caterpillars out of playdough and some pretend play, until the grand finale when a monster truck arrived, got stuck in the remaining playdoug and the game was over (butterflies luckily unharmed). One most love children's imagination!
Miss R stuck a couple of branches in the playdoug, did her usual thing with tearing off playdough and throwing it around, but then proceeded to licking the mirror and chatting to herself in the mirror.
The following day, I prepared a tractor orientated invitation. Mr A didn't seem impressed. He bluntly ignored tractors and demanded butterflies from the day before. He stuck all of them in the blob of playdough and declared that he was done for the day. Retrospectively, I should have kept building up on the butterfly theme... Rather than playing with playdough, they both joined me at preparing some bolognese sauce for dinner. Failure or success? Well, I've learned something new about their play... and they know what goes into a bolognese sauce.
Updated on 16/04/2014
The children like to help daddy in the mornings, while he is performing his ritual of making an espresso. So lately I have been putting out the playdough together with a manual coffee grinder, some cups and fairy cake molds. In that way, the children make their own pretend coffee and playdough cupcakes for everybody.
The day after I posted about our playdough explorations, Mr A keenly ground the coffee, made the cupcakes and we sat together to enjoy the coffee. However, minutes afterwards he returned to playdough, brought out the butterflies and asked me for some plants. It was lovely to see him creating his little imaginary world, chatting to butterflies, feeding the caterpillar... He was so engaged, he even asked me to sit down with him and play with his favourite butterfly. I am glad he revisited the original invitation by himself.
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