About Distracted Daddy
Distracted Daddy is a working father with a two-year-old daughter, a focused wife and a flatulent pug. When he’s not distracted he blogs about poop, parenting and other things at distracteddaddy.com.
How to Keep Toddlers Engaged
the fatherlode: playing indoors canada
(Jan.05.12)
Weekends are a lot of work for us parents of toddlers.
Toddlers need to be engaged, they need to be entertained, they need bread and circuses. Every weekend is a test to devise new ways to keep our toddler entertained until work resumes on Monday. That’s why we sign up for music classes and make unnecessary trips to the “go-che-ry” store.
In the summer occupying weekends is easy. “Let’s go to the park” is always the solution. The park has swings and slides and the occasional pot-smoking teenager. It’s the perfect place to kill time with the toddler.
Then just like Game of Thrones promised, winter arrives. The park becomes a frozen wasteland and no longer an option. Unless you want to carry a box of salt with you for when your toddler inevitably licks the frigid metal play structure.
Playing at home is fine, up to certain point. But after a few hours, it becomes all-work-and-no-play-makes-Jack-a-dull-boy. And the parenting guilt creeps up if we let her watch Sesame Street or Dora all day. So we need an activity, an excursion.
If only there was a playground not affected by inclement weather. An indoor playground if you will. Thankfully there’s one down the street from us, it’s attached to a McDonald’s but still. Actually, if you don’t buy a Big Mac every hour the minimum-wage-paid-teens frown on you using their playground.
It’s much easier to pay the entry fee of the actual indoor playground and there are less French fries in their ball pit. For some reason, we only recently discovered this indoor playground and it’s awesome.
It has a jungle gym and slides and books and costumes and riding toys and coffee. The play structure is even reinforced in case parents want to help their toddlers mountaineer across the thing. Not because they enjoy climbing around on it. All this for less than ten bucks a day.
When the weather outside is frightful, the mood inside is delightful – at least for the toddlers. Well, some of them. There’s always the background noise of a child crying and you have to watch your step lest you knee an ankle-biter in the noggin.
Imagine every toy you refuse to buy for your house. Now picture a dozen different ones. And a dozen more kids, all using them. There’s running and screaming and little people who act like they’re on methamphetamines.
It’s an exhausting place that’s perfect for the goldfish attention span of our little toddler. She runs from toy to toy. She never commits to one. She yells “Daddy come play” every other second. She climbs. She rides. She gets buried in the ball pit. She stares ominously at children playing with toys she wants. She doesn’t clean up after herself.
Then two hours later she’s ready for a massive nap. And you still have a day and a half of the weekend to kill.
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