Sock-Matching Activity for Busy Parents

Whether it is the huge change of moving across continents, saying goodbye to friends and temporarily staying at two addresses before arriving at our new home or the fact that Wugs is going through a developmental change (he turned three last month), we are encountering some interesting behaviour from him.  For instance, he will often ask for a hug and when I go to give him one, he will reject it saying he doesn’t want it.  When I turn away, he will then ask for one again and he will repeat this seemingly contradictory behaviour over and over again.  The same is the case with certain activities, such as putting on his socks.  He will sometimes refuse to do it and when I turn away (finding socks just another piece of “unnecessary” clothing on top of jumpers, hoodies and jackets that we have managed without until now), he will then ask for his socks again.  We have spoken a lot about every stage of our move to the UK with him, even down to the finest details of what we will do the next day before he goes to sleep so that there isn’t any surprises the next day, but we have been very busy and my activities with him have ground to a halt, so I’ve been looking for ways to include him in the jobs we need to do around the house.

On this occasion, I had a basket full of socks that I had just pulled out of the tumble dryer (all of us have been walking around with odd socks over the last few weeks so I did a wash that only included socks in the hope that they would be easy to pair up) and I was facing the unenviable task of having to match up about 30 of them with Wugs lying on the floor refusing to wear any.  I decided to turn the situation into a game by laying one pair of each sock on the table and leaving one pair in the basket for Wugs to find and match up.  He jumped to it right away and happily matched up the socks, pointing out the images on them.  A picture of a car led to a discussion about traffic lights and our new black car and when we would be travelling in it again.  The game became more challenging when it came to his dad’s socks which are of such subtle and varied patterns and shades of grey, black and brown that I have frequently mismatched them.   

There you go!  A way to involve your three year old when you are knee-deep in washing! Thankfully at the end of this activity Wugs found a pair of socks that he was happy to wear.  

We've arrived!

After weeks of car-hunting, house-hunting and clothes-hunting, we have finally moved into our new home in Surrey and Wugs and Dooey are enjoying their new playroom in the conservatory.  I have found myself sitting in there when it’s raining outside and listening to the rain hitting the glass (it sounds pretty loud in there) and being reminded of the monsoon season in Singapore when the skies would go dark and the heavy rain would hit against the balcony doors. We are adjusting to our new life over here…slowly… and I hope to post some more of our activities as Christmas approaches.  

A Cutting Box

In the final weeks of our stay in Singapore, I was busily packing boxes and needed an activity that would keep Wugs and Dooey entertained for some time. I realised that many of the materials I was throwing in the bin could be recycled into a cutting and colouring activity for them which helps develop fine motor skills.  I arranged the materials that were of varying degrees of toughness in a box and together with a pair of child scissors (for Wugs) and a packet of crayons (for Dooey), I left them to it. Sometimes it's the simplest activities that are the most effective and that was certainly true of this activity. Wugs asked for his cutting box and scissors every morning for a week to the point that we started to name him "The Shredder".

Here is a list of the items in our box:

Unwanted mail
Old magazines
Receipts
Wrapping paper scraps
Coloured transparent paper scraps
Bubble wrap scraps
Foam paper scraps