Welcome to this week’s casual kōrero thread!
This post will be pinned in this community so you can always find it, and will stay for about a week until replaced by the next one.
It’s for talking about anything that might not justify a full post. For example:
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Something interesting that happened to you
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Something humourous that happened to you
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Something frustrating that happened to you
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A quick question
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A request for recommendations
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Pictures of your pet
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A picture of a cloud that kind of looks like an elephant
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Anything else, there are no rules (except the rule)
So how’s it going?
I have a parenting hack for a 5 minute break. Last night one of my kids was saying “Dad, dad, can you give me a challenge?”. Expecting things like hop around the house on one foot, or that sort of thing.
I said “I bet you can’t sit still on a chair for 5 minutes”, this being a child who regularly falls off their chair at dinner time. They thought that was a great challenge, so I set a timer and the challenge was on. The look on their face made it look like they were concentrating harder than they had ever concentrated in their life, but they were really determined and managed to do it! And I got to sit down for a 5 min break 😮
After that, the other kids wanted to have a turn too, but one of them decided that they could just pause the timer and do some thing they wanted to do. Of course that defeats the purpose, but they didn’t think so, so I think the hack won’t work again.
On road trips my parents used to get us kinder with:
I now use it on my child units.
Haha does that actually work? I would think you’d see them in quite different places, and depending on the time of day you might not see a dog very often at all!
Yup, incredibly variable.
It also tends to trigger debates about whether pictures of said animals count. Which is a good discussion rather than siblings fighting about how ugly the other one is.
Sadly I don’t think my children would fall for it… I’ve tried the “Who can be quiet the longest” and it never worked!
Who can be quiet the longest works briefly on my kids, the only problem is their capability is pretty low.
I really like:
They nap for ages…
Okay, you win. That’s brilliant!
Oooh, I’m going to have to try that one! Though they might actually want to clean the house since I often use “we can’t do <fun thing> until the house is clean”, so there might be an expectation of doing fun things!