Idle hands

This weather is terrible. There's still snow on the ground, so even when it's something approaching warm, we can't go to a playground. And on days like today, with the the windchill taking it well below freezing, I don't want to venture out at all once we've been to school and back (twice, in today's case). Which makes for one bored, restless, frustrated kid all afternoon.

The nap problem is part of it, since Monkey's not-napping more frequently right now, so that I'm afraid if we go out in the car after 3pm, he'll fall asleep on the way home. And he's (we're / I'm) terrible at quiet time. How do you make them stay in their room and play quietly? How do you even make a kid play quietly?

Short of dire consequences, which I'm bad at due to lack of imagination and follow-through, I'm really unable to keep him in a different room. I did once say I'd throw Little Spider-Man in the bin if he didn't keep his seatbelt on, and that worked quite well, but it's not something I can use on a regular basis. Threatening no dinner is just pointless for my non-eater, and "witholding side" just sounds like a direct route to therapy. (For me now, him later.) I could lock him in his room by putting the child-safety baffle thingy on the doorknob, but that reduces him to hysterics straight away, and also endangers every other thing in his room. I can imagine that leaving him in his bedroom for an hour of quiet time would result in the contents of the drawers (all his and Miss's clothes) and the closet (all the towels, some clothes to grow into) and the bookshelf being thrown with force all over the room. And leaving him there until he picked them up again is just a non-starter. He's not that kid. Or I'm not that parent.

I try to engage him in some colouring or puzzles when Miss is napping and he's not, but he doesn't care. He'll just watch tv until he's going out of his mind with boredom, and then whine at me. He doesn't want to make things with Lego, he won't play with cars, he's only interested in badgering me to make a machine that will turn him into Spider-Man, usually by gluing a pile of random things together in a totally impractical, not to say impossible, way. Or variations on that theme.



[This is a typical machine. You can see how well glueing all this together - or stapling, or taping, or attaching by any other means - would work.]

Clearly, I'm doing this All Rong. I need to be more proactive in planning playdates for afternoons, but it's hard when I don't know from day to day whether he'll be napping. Also, some of our regular playdates are out of the loop right now due to their own crazy nap schedules, or working moms, or having moved back to Brazil (for instance).

Gentle reader, if you're out there and have your own Monkey, how do you enforce quiet time?