Every once in a while, I start to feel guilty about not providing my daughters with more stimulating, developmentally appropriate activities. My play repertoire at present pretty much consists of reading books to them, making stuffed animals dance for / kiss them, scooping them up and blowing raspberries on their stomachs so they'll giggle, and playing a game I like to call "I'll give you the ball, now you give it to me (thank you!), now I'll give it back to you, whoopeee!" (It's a long name). And then there are the times when I'm half playing with them / half puttering around doing chores or checking email / paying bills / checking for new blog comments, etc.
So, the other day, I was hanging out with the girls, and we were all chewing on plastic blocks or something, and it occurred to me that I needed some fresh ideas. So I turned to a book our babysitter, Jean, leaves at our house to read while she's here: Baby's First Year, Week by Week. In the 44th week chapter -- roughly the girls' age -- there was the following activity suggestion:
Gather together plastic, metal or wood scoops of various sizes and shapes. You might choose a coffee scoop, varoius-sized measuring cups, various-sized measuring spoons, plastic teaspoons and some serving spoons.Place baby on the floor in front of a pan or bowl filled with cotton balls. Place another pan or bowl next to it. Show him how to scoop the cotton balls from the first pan into the second with one of the scoops. Encourage him to scoop cotton balls from one pan into the other and to keep repeating his actions. Watch baby carefully so he doesn't put any objects in his mouth.
I thought: hey! I've got scoops! I've got bowls! I've got a bag of cotton balls I purchased circa 1998 that still hasn't been opened! I gathered the necessary materials (I stuck with just a couple of measuring cups for scoops, because I don't think even I have the small motor dexterity to pick up a cotton ball in a teaspoon) and got ready to be wowed by my daughters' 44-week-old ability to transfer small puffy objects from one receptacle to another via scoop. Needless to say, the activity didn't exactly go the way the authors of the book seemed to imply that it would.
The first thing the girls did was attempt to eat the cotton balls. (Duh.)
After scraping the cotton off of their tongues and lips with my fingers, I tried to work on the whole scooping thing -- getting them to actually use the measuring cups to scoop up cotton balls. Forget about transferring them anywhere; if they could just get cotton balls into the cups, I would have felt like the activity was a success. But they just put the measuring cups in their mouths. (Watch baby carefully so he doesn't put any objects in his mouth!) More specifically, they pretended to drink from them. This is one of their new favorite things to do: to "drink" from anything cup-like.
Or bowl-like....
At this point, I shifted gears and tried to work on just getting them to pick up cotton balls from one bowl and put them into the other one. Elsa managed to do it a couple of times before she got bored and started handing them to me or Clio instead. (Another favorite new activity: handing things to people.)
Clio seemed generally unimpressed by the whole enterprise. And I think she had some cotton stuck between her teeth.
Then things got really out of control.
I threw the cotton balls away, and we all went back to less sophisticated activities: Peekaboo. Tickling. Banging on the toy piano.
Are there really 10-month-olds in the world capable of scooping cotton balls from one bowl into another using a variety of scooping implements of different sizes and materials? Is something wrong with my children? Or are the authors of the book just, oh, I don't know, insane and demented? Yeah. I'm going to go with insane and demented.
