Too much time on hand!

Before becoming a parent I was not so social. General chit chat with someone didn’t really interest me. But well things change after one becomes a parent. The other parents become our friends and child related events namely play dates or birthday parties become our idea of socialisation. No I am not excited; I am just about recovering from this shock. You can’t beat them join them.

Looking at the brighter side, I get a lot of insight into human relations, expectation from child/spouse etc. from these interactions. I learn most of my parenting lessons or shocks from other parents. More shocks than lessons in fact. My ideas of parenting don’t really fit the ‘norm’.

I want to discuss this one point that comes up time and again with many parents irrespective of the child’s age, birth order, and place of living or gender of the child. The complaint is “I don’t know how to keep my child occupied”, “My child gets so bored all the time”, “I have so much of work at home its easier to plonk the child in front of the TV”, and “My child just can’t do without the TV” etc. Are you wondering what the shock here is? Yea I know! See I told you I don’t meet the conventional parent norm.

My problem is a little different, neither me nor my child find the time to watch TV. Yup you read that correctly. No it’s not the ‘old TV’ or ‘bad cable’ issue I promise. We have a state of art Plasma TV and a dish antenna to serve us. But we just don’t have the time for it.

Want to know why? Because there are so many things we are busy with, and trust me I am good at multi-tasking. Its easier to list them down:

1. Chit chatting. Yes we yap yap yap. There are so many things to be told and understood. Most of the yapping is done during meals, changing clothes, waiting for the school bus etc.
2. Then we love reading books. I have around 100 books we haven’t yet touched some of them. And we love reading the same stories over and over again.
3. We also love browsing the newspaper. No no not reading yet but browsing the pictures and figuring out what exactly the story is, or word recognition, colour recognition etc.
4. Then there is the age old colouring, drawing favourites. We have all mediums of colour namely crayons, pencil colours, sketch pens, watercolor and gel colour etc.
5. Indoor toys: We have a huge load of toys like bowling, blocks, board games and a huge fleet of cards, trains with tracks etc.. We brood that we haven’t played with them in ages.
6. Outdoor play: This is a must and can go on for as long as 2 hours. The only exceptions being the monsoon.
7. Academic play: We are at a stage where reading has just about begun. So there are tons of phonic related plays we need to play.
8. Daily school work: In my quest to get the child used to text books we attempt reading school lessons. This is one habit that I believe helps the student a great deal in the long run.
9. Then there are interesting extra information to be sought like our latest priced possession one science book. We found about the largest living animal, earth’s crust etc..
10.  Random questions: Yes there are random googly thrown at me like what lies below the skin, what is kidney, are my toes looking bigger in comparison to yesterday etc..
11.  Then comes the super fun things like figuring out where to take the next vacation to? Listing locations, wondering what all can be done there, how to reach etc..
12. And actually going out to interesting places and discovering the sand, oceans playing with sand toys, seeing the mountains etc..

These are just a few things I remembered off hand. And seriously we have no time for TV. Just as an activity to be fitted in we watch it over the weekends. Do you see and understand what I was saying? Pray tell me how to deal with this.

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Aarti Rathod