Mummy confession time. As a working mom, it’s sometimes hard not to feel mummy’s guilt for the many hours from Sophie. To make up for the lost time when I’m away from Sophie, I sometimes fall into the trap of making it up by giving Sophie material things like toys, toys and more toys. No doubt we also spend lots of quality time with her after work on weekdays and over weekends, sometimes it still eats at me when she’s spending more time in the child care while I’m at work. I know that it’s not our gifts that our children look forward to so I’ve reminding myself to stop “buying” her attention and give her attention, the good old way by being present in her life at every opportunity I can.
In the midst of our decluttering, I told Alexis and Sophie that we’re going to stop buying toys before we turn our home into a toy shop. I think Sophie got the idea because last weekend when we went to the new Toys R Us at City Square Mall, which was mega huge by the way, she picked up a toy, fiddled with it then turned and said, “We cannot buy anymore toys right, mama?”.
I was surprised by how sensible she was and responded with a nod and smile. That’s a mother’s pride that no money can buy.
But for kids, playing is still important so we looked around the house and see what we could use to turn them into toys. What I was trying to teach Sophie is that we don’t always need to have more stuffs in our lives when we can make the best of what we have.
So with just a few toilet rolls and a tennis ball, we got ourselves a bowling set
Needless to say, we had a bowling good time. Good, old fashioned fun that is classic and timeless.
Do you also make your own games at home with your kids? Do share some DIY game ideas that we can try our hands at too.
We love this game at home too! Playing with or drawing on recycled materials entertains my girl for ages. It’s wonderful what a few recycled stuff can do. 🙂
Plus we’re saving the Earth 🙂
I saw an idea similar to this as well but couldn’t find any sufficient quantity of ordinary household objects that are stackable and uniform in size to use as pins. So what a great idea to use toilet paper rolls! Never thought of that!
Serenely, for younger kids, you can use Vitagen bottles or 1 litre pet bottles too
I am beginning to see the usefulness of DIY toys…it’s economical, stretches our creativity and teaches environmental conservation (recycling)…Thanks for sharing this game 🙂
Toilet rolls and kitchen towel rolls have got to be the most useful materials around. Haha!
When Dumpling was younger, we used cardboard box and made it into buses / cars where we’d sit inside for pretend play. We also use egg trays and toss ping pong balls inside aka tikum tikum style. Lol.
Oh I’m so guilty of that! But I’ve since stopped buying toys for her cos we’ve saving up for overseas trips haha. Love the toilet rolls idea! Actually the simplest things are what kids love. Sometimes after I buy an expensive toy for my girl and she gets bored after 30 minutes, really feel like I wasted my money…