As my child gets older, keeping her preoccupied and stimulated becomes more challenging. When she was a newborn, it seemed pretty straight forward, and she mostly slept all day. But as she has gotten older and more aware, we have a task that she seems to love.
Starting around Christmas, my child was able to take notice of us decorating the apartment for the holidays, she was particularly fascinated with the Christmas lights.
The way the lights made her eyes sparkle with joy made me realize that she was starting to understand her world a little more. And she seemed to enjoy how we had made the apartment look.
Decorating is always something we have enjoyed in our house, the most recent ones to go up have been our St. Patrick’s Day decorations. And including my child in the process made for an amazing day for the both of us.
The day started with me taking her to the storage unit to pick up the decorations, and she was able to learn an impromptu lesson in organization, because I had left the unit in disarray for quite a while.
Then it was a quick trip to the store for some new St. Patricks day decorations because our collection was a little bare. She also loves seeing all the different decorations on the shelves.
We ended up deciding on a neat little bottle cap shaped sign with “Happy St. Patrick’s Day” on it. It would add some much needed flare to our decoration collection.
Then the car ride home, even this is a great opportunity for fun because she gets to jam out to music in the car.
Her favorites at the moment are The Beatles, and Led Zeppelin, and it’s definitely not because I had indoctrinated her.
Now she is getting to an age where she notices what I am doing. And showing her the process of how I put up our little wooden signs and homemade wooden four-leaf clovers is a great lesson in how to organize and perform a task.
It’s a simple task sure, but all of these amazing things I described came from the simple task of decorating our apartment and taking little opportunities like this with your child will be memories that will last forever.