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| Myself and My 2year Old Toddler |
There's been times where I found myself starring at my daughter and not knowing what to do with her. Honestly, this was due to lack of planning from my side and as a result, I just let her watch TV. As a full time working mom, who films Daily Vlogs and Ad-hoc videos that I upload on YouTube, life can get very hectic at times to a point where I live on disaster recovery mode. Of course the planner and organizer freak in me wasn't very happy with this so I got up and I looked for ideas to keep my lil one busy. With this mission, Little Activity Buckets were born. I needed something that I'd be able to plan ahead and something that I knew my Kbear would not only love but also enjoy.
So one day, I took her into her playroom and I asked her to give me her favourite toys. Once she was happy with what she gave me, I went back into the playroom, took out all the toys she gave me and put them aside. Then looked through all the ones she didn't pick and came up with ways to make them interesting enough for her to like them. This helped me get her to play with almost all of her toys without putting up a fight. For the longest time she's had toys that she never played with because she just wasn't interested and we were stuck with a playroom filled with toys and no one to play with!
Something to note: I change what I put in the Lil Buckets every week just to keep things interesting and if I do have to use toys from the previous week, I pick a different day.
The little buckets are 1litre capacity,so they are pretty small. But I labelled them Monday through Sunday, which means, there's an activity for each day. This way, I don't have to worry about trying to figure out what to do for the day. You can put in just about anything inside the little buckets or boxes even and just to give you an idea, here are some of the things I put in the buckets:
- Finger paint
- Colouring pencils
- Pages to colour
- Beads
- Small Board Books
- Little Tea Cups
- Finger Puppets
- Puzzles
- Flash Cards
- Stacking Blocks
- Alphabet Letters
- Stickers and Little drawings
- There are full sized books we use that cannot fit into the buckets as well as stuffed animals for imaginary play.
Every day is different and she loves opening her lil buckets to find out what's inside. I try by all means to keep it educational as well as fun. This has been my life and sanity saver. I get to focus at least 30min on prepping dinner while she plays then I join her and we play together. Note, I have nothing against letting my lil one watch TV but I do have a problem with too much TV and very lil activity. I am planning to keep this going for as long as possible but I will change the activities as she grows older to make sure they are age appropriate.
Go ahead, give it a try and let me know how it goes. You can pop me an Instagram msg or Facebook on the below if you want. Would love to see how your Activity Packs turn out:
Instagram : @oluv_ (www.instagram.com/oluv_)
Facebook: Mommy and Baby Approved (www.facebook.com/MnBapproved)
Until then, enjoy playing with your lil ones and remember to not sweat the little stuff.
xoxo
Oluv