twenty minute toddler fun

“Here Mama.  Eat. Have enerzy tell story.”  A pretend bite of pancake is shoved into my mouth.  The salty taste of toddler fingers lingers on my lips as I pretend to masticate then swallow the gigantic bite.  Clearly a few truths are evident here:

A)  You don’t need fifth grade health class to teach you that food contains calories which equal energy.

B)  Imaginary pancakes prepared by toddler hands are far superior to those that flip off of my stove top.

C)  Little Friend’s Mama must have far too many low-energy slumps throughout the day.  Either that, or she’s using “no energy” as an excuse to get out of story telling.

Here’s the underlying problem also evidenced in this interaction: my Little Friend has a longer attention span than I do.

Somehow that baby attention span of 7 seconds has grown right along with the arms, legs, torso, and hair that equal the rest of Little Friend.  Her attention has stretched from one book to a gazillion books (at least it feels that way to Low-Enerzy-Mama.)  While this attention span can be frustrating when my head is bobbling on my shoulders as I attempt to keep eyelids raised to the “The End” page of a book, I’m actually quite delighted to see the mature thinking, eager attention, and curious mind that emerges along with a longer attention span.

Here are two of our favorite Toddler activities that require at least 20 minutes of attention span:

SHAVING CREAM PLAY

How cheap, how simple, how clean can child’s play possibly be?  Shaving cream is the answer.  For a little over $1 a can, Shaving Cream Play is the perfect 20-minute summer activity.

We set up Shaving Cream Shop on our back deck this afternoon and introduced Little Friend to the sweet-scented joy of shaving cream.  After some clear instructions on not eating the cream, she got down to business.

And what could be fun with Shaving Cream if not the hose-down at the end?

You can’t tell me that you’d turn down the chance to turn the hose on your own kid every now and then.  Let’s just review: now this is fun for kids and parents.

FAMILY STORYTELLING

Little Friend is a two-year-old with an impressive memory.  She remembers that time that her Mama fell off a bike and suffered a scraped knee that still boasts rocks grown into the wound.  She remembers the frog that her Daddy found and nurtured until someone (certainly not his brother who was charged with watching the frog one weekend) let it out of the cage and it escaped.  She remembers the time her grandmother attempted to dig her way to China in a Michigan back yard.  She remembers how her grandfather lost his new shoes after jumping from a barn loft into a juicy pile of manure below.

She remembers a lot.  Even if she wasn’t there for the original events in the stories.

Her memories are thanks to a cadre of story tellers who have gathered around to share the little slices of life that make for captivating toddler entertainment.  For about a year now, we have been stretching Little Friend’s attention span by telling her the life stories of the people closest to her: parents, cousins, and grandparents.  No story is too small to be embellished into toddler wonderland.

story box

The stories have been collected and stored in our Story Box.

“Do you have any stories we could tell Little Friend?” we bug our family members and friends.  Because quite frankly folks, Little Friend’s attention span outlasts our own.  After the seventh retelling of “Daddy and the Frog”, our brains want to shut down.  So we beg new tales and write down the title on a strip of paper.

story box and stories

The strips go into the Story Box.

Which lives in whichever room it was last needed.

The story box, in another life, was a boring cardboard shoe box.  The collage of pictures once upon a time were lost in the pages of a Real Simple magazine.  A little bit of creative cutting and a glue stick or two later, and the Story Box was born.  It’s been well-fed with story strips ever since.

And when Little Friend (read: Mama and Big Friend) needs new yarns, we fish out a strip of paper and knit a new tale.

As much as I complain about the (literally) hours of time we’ve spent telling Little Friend stories, I’m not really complaining.  Deep down in my heart of hearts, I will always find the enerzy, even without fuel from imaginary pancakes, to tell family stories to a little one whose eyes blaze with interest and who can retell and mold the stories to her own liking:

“One time, I hear noise.  Go ‘ribbit, ribbit.’  Find ittle frog.  Pick up ittle frog.  Take show Grammie.  Grammie say ‘Oh, goodness!’  I put in cage.  Ittle frog stick out ittle finger.  Open cage.  Hey!  Where frog go?!”

This post shared with Mama’s Losin’ It Writer’s Workshop.

7 Comments

  1. I most certainly would like to get in on that hose action (and I did recently!). My girls had been asking to go to the pool, but the pool is jam-packed w/people, and some of them not so nice at having even more people join the fray. So, daddy’s idea: we’ve got water here! And fun ensued.

    I love the story box idea!

    July 28, 2011
    Reply
  2. Love your story telling idea! The shaving cream looks like a blast. Fun times.
    ~FringeGirl

    July 28, 2011
    Reply
  3. Nancy said:

    I look forward to each and every posting. You brighten and lighten my day. Maybe you could tell the story of the day Melissa and Johanna put up a tent that the parents thought would take all day and only took minutes. You can include bits about how much fun all of you had hanging out in the back yard tent. Love you lots.

    July 28, 2011
    Reply
  4. Nancy said:

    or there is the fun story of dog sitting for neighbors during the storm.

    July 28, 2011
    Reply
  5. kt moxie said:

    Oh, we are definitely going to try the shaving cream idea at my house!

    July 29, 2011
    Reply
  6. dogear6 said:

    That is a great way to tell the family stories. My niece loves hearing them, unfortunately my adult daughter does not. Surprisingly though, she reads my blog and comments on it. So she’s still getting the stories, but in a more indirect way.

    And those shaving cream pictures are priceless! Be sure to back them up on Shutterfly or wherever.

    Nancy
    http://www.dogear6.com

    July 30, 2011
    Reply
  7. Shaving cream! Now why didn’t I think of that?

    I’m so using that. Thanks!

    August 1, 2011
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