Toddler
Treasure Hunt
Download a treasure hunt sheet here
How do you get a two-year-old, who is perfectly capable of walking, to go where you want at a speed that isn’t so painfully slow you want to cry, without demanding to be carried after about 2 minutes?
If you already have this cracked then I worship you! For me, a walk to the shops, the library or even the park, can have me breathing deeply and counting to ten rather too often. I regularly resort to the buggy for journeys, despite knowing that she can walk the few 100 yards, just so that I don’t have to a) chase her the wrong way down the street, b) drag her along like a sullen teenager or c) carry her!
The other day I hit upon an idea, however, and it was so simple…we did a treasure hunt. I printed off an A4 sheet with her name at the top (that alone was exciting for the munchkin!) and six pictures of things to find: a brown leaf, a green leaf, a stick etc. We headed out with said list, a bag to collect things in an a smiling, excited daughter. She walked all the way to the park, gleefully searching for stones and grass. She didn’t say she wanted to be carried. She uncomplainingly held my hand across the roads and she went the right way at a reasonable speed. Result! She even came back in the same way looking for the last thing.
One word of warning though…I printed a red flower. Red flowers are not often found wild at this time of year. Darling daughter would not pick a different coloured flower, despite my protestations that I had only meant a flower, and the red was just for illustrative purposes, so if you want your child to be able to achieve the treasure hunt (without climbing over people’s garden walls…) consider the colour of flower!
R
Download a treasure hunt sheet here
Toddler morality
The other morning I discovered that my two and a half year old is well on the way to a life of petty crime… I was in the kitchen attempting to repair the carnage that breakfast in our house inevitability brings, and the munchkin was happily playing in the dining room. I could hear her ‘tidying’ the coasters and ‘putting away’ her toys. All is well, I thought, and ploughed on with the washing-up mountain. Next I hear her ask, “Can I play with Stanley, Mummy?”
Stanley is a plastic money box that Nanny brought her a few weekends ago. Nanny works in a well-known bank (as they say on the Beeb!) and the plastic money box is in the shape of the aforementioned ‘Stanley’ the dog, which is in the adverts at the moment. The money box caused some hilarity (and some squirming from me) when, the munchkin went round asking all the guests in our house for “some coins for my moneybox”. That’s OK when it’s the people who brought the moneybox, and even Mummy and Daddy, but when she started pouncing on friends we had staying and saying, “No, I want a silver one!” it got a touch embarrassing!
Anyway, I digress, on this particular morning she was merrily playing with Stanley, “Shall we go over here, Stanley”, “Come on Stanley let’s go for a walk” etc and then I heard the tinkle of money being dropped into the money box. I knew there were a couple of pennies on the side that I had found in the lining of my handbag earlier, so I paid no heed, but then I realised there were a good deal more tinkles that there had been pennies…
I popped my head around the door to see the munchkin emptying coins, one by one from my purse into her moneybox. She looked at me and in all innocence said, “Look Mummy, I’ve found some real money for my money box”!
R
If this two and a half, what hope is there?!
Rose-tinted spectacles
I love my mother. She is my best-friend and confidante. She is the woman who brought me up. She is an excellent Grandmother and a fantastic emergency, child-minder. I value her opinions and trust her judgement… most of the time!
Recently, however, there has been one thing I have to disagree with her about and that’s the terrible-twos.
The munchin is not the worst behaved toddler I know by a long stretch, and I don’t think that anyone else would say that she is either, but she is two and she does have her moments. I have made comment about those moments to Mum on the phone on a number of occasions.
I am usually at home on my own with her when she throws a real wobbler (thank goodness still appears to happen mainly in the house) and I often feel the need to off load. Who better to call in the middle of the day and let off steam to than your mother?
Well last time I called and made comment about the ‘terrible-twos’ and a small barney that myself and munchkin had had over something trivial, mother decided that the best thing to do was tell me how she and her friends had all been discussing this issue and had come to the conclusion that it must be modern parenting which caused this, as none of them had ever had a problem with their children. Way to make me feel better Mum!
We chatted for a while (with me no doubt sounding a little frosty) about why I didn’t think my parenting had created some sort of monster-child; how I wasn’t parenting all that differently to her and that one off refusals from a toddler are developmentally normal, but still she said, “I can see what you mean, but I think it’s just like stress, neither of them really existed in the past”!
I have decided that rather than falling out with my Mum on this one, (and I’m not even getting into the debate about ‘stress’!) I shall instead take a positive message from my mother and her friends’ rose-tinted spectacles. No matter how awful those tantrums seem now, the memory of them must fade to nothing over the years. What other explanation could there be for an entire generation of angel-toddlers?!
R
- ← Previous
- 1
- 2
- 3
More Than A Mum Blog 