A good portion of any mother’s day is spent thinking of things to do to pass the time.
Eventually babies tire of looking at the sky while you perform your Oscar-worthy ‘Look! Clouds!’ soliloquy. It’s time to find something else to occupy their time because it’s still nine hours until Daddy comes home and you’re already sobbing into your Milo and dreaming of going to the toilet without someone sitting on your lap.
Kids need entertainment. All the bloody time.
Now, let’s be clear: newborns do not need to be entertained. Your face is entertainment. Hearing your voice is entertainment. Looking at leaves on the trees is entertainment. Looking at leaves is so entertaining they’ll probably have a good scream to let off steam and fall into a fitful sleep afterwards.
But after a few months, when your kid can finally look at you straight on without going cross-eyed, you’re going to want to find things to fill their non-napping time.
Your child is not boring, but spending time doing their activities will make you want to cry a little bit. You’ll have the occasional flashback to those days you used to … actually, you won’t even be able to remember what you did before the baby arrived. It’ll seem unfathomable that you ever had a full sixteen hours every day to just do things you wanted to do. What did you even do?
Whatever it was, it was probably more stimulating than banging a ball on a table. Or flipping through the same board book for the seventy-sixth time in an hour.
You might even be tempted to hop on to Pinterest and look up ‘sensory activities for six month olds’ and I won’t stop you. The search alone will eat up a good hour or two of your day. But then you’ll realise you don’t have a ready supply of pom-poms, water beads and red beans and you’ll give up. Or maybe you’ll spend four hours packing yourself and your child up, jump in the car to go and buy all the supplies, come home and set it all up; your child will stick his hand in those beans for two and a half minutes and then vomit and playtime will be over for the day.
Sometimes, the mere process of planning and setting up and almost executing ‘sensory playtime’ will make you feel like you’ve achieved something. A bit like when you used to complete tasks at work. Remember that? When you felt productive? Good times.
The secret is that kids don’t want sensory play or educational toys. They want objects that serve as physical barriers, which can be climbed over to get to the things they really want: anything breakable, poisonous or dangerous in your home.
Kids love knives. And fire. And dog poo. And heights. I’m not sure they actually want to stay alive.