One of the biggest advantage about being a mum or dad is that you become more creative.
When your kids don’t understand something, you have to find the most creative way to explain to them so that they understand. No difficult terms or ‘adult language’, only stuffs they can understand. That is totally tough, I tell you.
When your kids disobey you, you have to find creative ways to discipline them such that they get your point and yet don’t hate you (too much).
When your kids are bored, you have to be super creative to think of games and activities that they can do, so that they don’t get into all kind of nonsense and drive you to your grave earlier than you would like to. I say, this area of creativity can make or break your life as a parent. A win-win situation is much sought-after – One where the kids are happy (ding! ding!) and the parents are happy too (ding! ding! ding!).
On one of the days when the kids were home wondering what they can do in the afternoon, I switched on my creative gear and made them play ‘Make Believe’. We made believe that we were little ‘Noahs’ guiding the animals to go into the ark. Haha! It was mega easy. Just bring out a basket of plastic animals, make the kids arranging them in lines two-by-two (“The animals went in two by two, hurra hurra..”). The ark does not have to be a real ship of course. It doesn’t even need to look anything like a ship. Remember it’s ‘Make Believe’?
I can’t believe how fun it was for the kids. They had fun queuing the animals, and Joey even had her own system and logic of who should queue up with who. I left it to her completely. She was the chief usher.
Kids are generally not as nimble with their hands, so they took crazy a lot of time just to queue all the animals up. Now that, parents, is what we are all aiming for, isn’t it? Some game that can occupy them for the longest time possible.
I made the insects and creepy crawlies go in via another queue of their own and made Jayne in charged of that queue. She was very pleased with it.
She even made sure Barney got on the ark as well. Very impressive indeed.
For us, the ark was the red ikea table at home. =) Once all the animals were lined up neatly in rows of twos, we gave the commandments for all the animals to march into the ark. ‘Now everybody, it’s time to get onboard… LET’S MOVE IT!!!’ You can imagine how majestic it was. We had so much fun that afternoon. Haha!
