Monday 1 July 2013

A Lesson in Parental Hubris



June has been a busy month for us with birthdays, anniversaries and getting used to our new routines now I am back at work, but we have also been trying to make lots of time for fun stuff too and especially time to spend with the little lady in our family. To that end the mister and I decided we would try to make something (simple, obviously) for our daughter to play with and since we had a box knocking around which she had had lots of fun playing with, we thought it would be cute if we turned it into something. Inspired by things I had seen on blogs and pinterest etc, we settled on making our box into a bus.

So this weekend, while our little one napped one afternoon we got out the paints and glue gun and got to work. We painted the box, painted paper plates for wheels, stuck on some shiny card (I did tell you it was simple!) and probably spent a little too long playing with photoshop to make a cute little license plate. We finished up our efforts that evening after bedtime.

We stood back and admired our handy work, mentally patting ourselves on the back for being cute and clever.

The next morning we proudly showed off our bus box to our daughter, plonked her inside and loved watching her laugh as her daddy wizzed her up and down the hallway in it. Being a snap happy mama I naturally took a billion pictures of this.













After the fun we left our little one to play while we got on with the morning tasks. After five minutes alone with the bus our angel had already found a weak spot in the construction and had begun testing the security of the windows and the solidity of the headlights. I'm pretty sure she has a budding career as a vandal ahead of her! I suspect only the absence of crayons immediately to hand stopped her from tagging the side of the bus aswell.

C'est la vie!

The moral of the story is this. She loved the box. She loved the bus. She loved being wizzed up and down the hallway in the box, however it looked. (In fact, I've wizzed her around in an empty laundry basket with just the same response). Really, we didn't need to make the box pretty for her. We probably did it more for ourselves in truth. But it was fun! And ultimately, if the bus box only last five mintues unscathed it doesn't matter, just as it wouldn't have mattered if we'd left her with just an undecorated box to play with. It's far more important I guess to take the time to wizz her round and make her laugh than anything else (and most importantly, to take the time to laugh with her while we wizz her round) because it's easy to get caught up in the day to day necessary tasks which we 'have' to get done and forget the fun that can be found in the everyday.

At least this is one parenting lesson which is easily learned, if not always easily remembered!

 I hope you all had a lovely weekend and a fun filled June, the summer stretches ahead of us - I hope we can make lots more memories in the weeks to come!

Coco Blue.

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