Play-Doh Play-Date / SO YOU GET EXCITED!!

I have the privilege for the next three weeks of having an interim stay-at-home dad right next door. Lucky me. Garrett and his wife have just welcomed their secondborn and Garrett's enjoying his first week of paternity leave.  He has the privilege of not only watching their newborn and their 4yo daughter, Clare, but also another 3yo girl from their building, Angela. Lucky him.

With the agreement to always having coffee available to us, we decided it may be beneficial to our sanity if we would try to have our kids play together in the hope that one of our babies would be calm at a given moment allowing that baby's parent to apply some supervision and interaction with the toddlers.  That's the hope anyway.

We've been over to their place several times as an entire family and left our own disaster path.  I felt it was only fair to allow their kids to ruin my stuff now.  Within a few minutes of their morning visit, Clare and Angela found Bucky's new 20 color Play-Doh set.

Banana used to show actual size.

One of Bucky's characteristics is that he is very meticulous in keeping his things organized and notices when the smallest things are out of place.  We recently moved a few bags out of our room that had been there for several weeks.  For five subsequents trips through our room, Bucky has asked "What happened here?"  Books go with books. Blocks go with blocks. Trains go with trains. Mommy goes with Daddy.  When it comes to Play-Doh, colors are certainly separated if possible.  It's not a tragedy if we end up with some mixed, but it's never the goal.

As Clare descended upon the Play-Doh, her first agenda was to very thoughtfully share 4 of the colors and keep only 16 to herself.  After some hard bargaining I managed to emphasize the negatives of a monopoly in our hard economic times and earned my clients 1 extra color. So with her dwindling number of 14, Clare's next agenda was to make rainbow cake.  In fact this was indeed Clare's brilliant argument as to why she needed so many colors -- to make a big enough cake to then share with everyone.  With great speed and vigor that only a 4yo is capable of, the great baker layered and stacked her 14 colors and proceeded to make her great (pan)cake an inch thick.  Perhaps she meant biscuits, though as any good baker knows, to make a flaky biscuit you must fold the dough several times.  Indeed, Clare was making biscuits. When the folding had finished, the division of the dough was completed with a heart-shaped cookie cutter. We gratefully received our, not rainbow, but brown hearts. To Clare's credit, most baked goods are brown.

 As a side: Play-Doh is quite easy and inexpensive to make, and had Bucky shown aversion to this process I certainly would have stepped in. However, to my amazement he was quite happy with his 3 colors, and I'm a sucker for baked goods.

Crafted with love.

After Bucky's quiet time, I invited them over again to spend some time in the backyard.  While in the process of inviting them, I committed a cardinal sin of setting up a play-date and announced the planned activity to the group before first getting clearance from the other parent. "Who wants to run through the sprinkler?!" A joyous sound was raised by our younger members. And Garrett responded with raised eyebrows.  My oversight was that Angela did not have a swimsuit or a change of clothes.

I quickly came up with several other activities to try and get their minds off the sprinkler.  Distance makes the heart grow fonder.  The next hour was filled with playing in the sandbox, creating boundaries in the backyard, creating special water cups with their names on it, re-establishing boundaries, outlining their bodies with chalk and then coloring them in, and being demanded my philosophy on why the patio umbrella was only to be used as a patio umbrella and should be used as nothing else. We did everything except run through the sprinkler.  However, the sprinkler began as and remained the main topic of conversation.

After 45 minutes of first reasoning, then dodging, then distracting, then avoiding the question, "When are we going in the sprinkler?", I finally made my last stand and outright said, "We are not going to play in the sprinkler today, but we can on Wednesday when Angela can ask her parents to pack her a swimsuit."  That should work. How clever of me. "When are we going to run through the sprinkler?"  "If we do everything today there won't be anything left to do on Wednesday, and this way you can get EXCITED about it!"  This seems to satisfy Bucky and he quietly returns to his chalk outline. I don't think much of it other than that he is now bored of listening to me and wants to check out. I only receive paused puzzled faces from the girls. "Can we do the sprinkler now?" "No. On Wednesday." "Why Wednesday?" "It's something to look forward to."

Bucky did all his coloring on the right. He doesn't wear shirts . . . Just sleeves.

Thus far I've been nearest to the girls and therefore the responsibility of answering questions has fallen on me, but here Garrett interjects and says, "Are you guys listening to Marshall?" "Yes." "What did he say?" "We don't know." Oh they know.  And it's about here that I catch Bucky walking back towards the broken-record girls with a crumpled brow on his face.

The girls give it one last go. "Why do we have to wait until Wednesday?!?" Me. "I already told you." Garrett. "You two aren't LISTENING!"  And Bucky with the greatest 2.5yo voice and courage he can muster towards the older girls, "SO YOU GET EXCITED!!" . . . Argument ended.

Bucky was listening. I am so proud of him.

________
Stay-at-Home Dad, stay at home dad, SAHD