Three of Alex’s favourite things. Adding to the list would probably be chips, ice cream, long trains and birds of prey!
We’ve been playing transformers a lot recently – it seems to be Alex’s ‘special time’. He really held on to that idea of special time from Hand in hand parenting. He would have special time all day long if he could 🙂 Back to transformers – it’s a hard thing to do as an adult, pretending, It’s not particularly exciting for me of course, but Alex is so happy when I do play so I try not to get distracted by my own things. It is very interesting to watch him play though and see how the game pans out. We usually have teams of transformers. Alex gets all the best ones of course. He then chooses who fights who and then of course he wins each battle. His gun noises are remarkable! And he corrects my transforming noise constantly. Sometimes we play transformers where we are the transformers, and a battle and chase ensues. He’s getting too fast for me now though!
I’ve tried to keep our homeschool park day quiet in the mornings by just playing at home. Alex hasn’t been too keen lately, so we’ve missed a few. We stopped at the library on the way and found a plane and truck book. As we were the first to the park, we read the books. Alex was especially interested in the planes and the book had a dissected A380 inside and so I talked about the parts of the plane to Alex and my involvement with it. We also found an F35 STOVL and he was fascinated. He is most interested in fighter planes and it’s really great to be able to share something that i’ve been involved with with him. His play since then has often mentioned ‘the fighter plane that lands like a helicopter’, and he noticed the fan and things and worked out what is happening.
The park was slow – people arrived much later than us, we were almost about to leave when a few showed up. We headed down to the river. Alex found a playmate in an almost 5 year old with as much energy and noise to match him! The kids had heaps of fun, but of course it was a struggle to get him to leave.
The following day, Alex asked to go to the zoo. I wanted to go to Ceres market for organic seedlings, so we compromised and did both seeing as the kids were up early and we could get to the zoo by 10am. We had the fortune of seeing a snake start to shed in the reptile house. We spent quite some time watching the progress, many people passed us by! We decided to go have lunch and return to check the progress. The shed was complete! Both kids love the reptile house, and Alex knows most of the snakes by name (species). Daniel wanted to visit the giraffes and of course the monkeys. It’s great that he has an interest outside of Alex’s. Finally the kids played in Keeper Kids – Daniel enjoys dressing up and Alex is exploring more than just snake collections!