toddler crafting
Somewhere between toddlerhood and preschool I realized I wasn’t the kind of mother who liked to craft.
I had visions of myself spending hours on the floor with my boys, playing with paint and glue and construction paper, making fabulous twee creations that we would display around our house and take gorgeous soft-focus photographs of.
It seemed like the natural progression of my attachment parenting beginning — if you give birth in the water, breastfeed into toddlerhood, practice baby-led weaning, don’t vaccinate, and allow your children to explore the playground on their own, the next step is homeschooling, right? It’s a few more years of crunchy bliss where your kids wear knits that you made yourself or recycled from the thrift store, and wear shirts with a bird stuck on them.
It was my dream.
Until I realized I hated it.
Maybe I introduced Matchbox cars too early. Or I’m not artsy enough. Or don’t have the patience to either find ideas about creative play or put it into practice.
No matter what it is, teaching my kids at home turned out not to be the thing for me.
My boys barely had the patience for two minutes of finger painting, and since it takes at least that long for me to set it up, strip them down, and then catch them and wipe them clean before paint gets all over the house, it hardly seems worth it.
So I got a job. And I put my boys in daycare.
The mind-boggling thing for me was that it wasn’t that hard of a decision.
I am incredibly fortunate to have found a job I absolutely love, working with amazing women, with a flexible schedule, good pay, and that I can do from home. I spend my days on the phone or on my computer (sometimes at Starbucks, just to have a change of pace!), and I relish my alone time and the blissful quiet that comes with it.
It gives me time to put dinner in the crock pot, clean the kitchen, straighten up the house, do some laundry, put away clothes, run a quick vacuum, and even put on a touch of makeup without having to explain every step of what I’m doing, or make sure the baby isn’t chewing on something he pulled out of the garbage, or wondering why my older boy is suddenly naked.
I know everyday activities are teaching moment with my children, and perhaps if I dug down deep I would find joy in pulling chairs up to the counter for every kitchen task. But instead I chose this path, and I’m happy.
I miss my kiddos every minute of the day. It hurts my heart when my 18-month old cries when I hand him to his teacher, but I also feel so much joy when I pick them up and give them big hugs and my oldest one tells me about his day and I hear the new words my younger one has learned. Spending time away from them has given me renewed excitement about having dinner as a family, and playing for half an hour before we go upstairs for the bedtime routine no longer feels like a chore.
Not everything about the transition has been ideal. I wish I could have kept my younger one with me a bit longer, but I can’t afford school for my older one unless I work, which means I had to find childcare for my younger one too. The first daycare we tried felt like a disaster to us, so we’re changing to new arrangements for the new year.
But it’s all working itself out, and my boys have definitely benefited from an environment where they have access to creative activities administered by someone who isn’t a grump worried about paint on the couch.
It’s not the vision I had for myself as a mother, and it’s not what I thought would make us all happy. But sometimes life just doesn’t work out the way we expect, and I’m glad I was open enough to realize the unexpected was the biggest blessing for us all.
Photo credit: mollypop on Flickr
