activities for a 1 year old

Ponyo

"Ponyo"

HUH? Say again?

"Ponyo"

As I try in vain to go back into the wonderful dream I was having ( something lovely involving a vacuum cleaner that I wasnt holding, a huge lasagne dish that I wasnt cleaning, and me holding a lovely large pina colada... please please let me go back!!) my son is whispering in my ear "Ponyo".

Its actually the last thing he said to me last night as well.After a whole week of him having to do craft, painting, and helping me get through my first week without Jumeirah he had had enough and wanted a tv morning. He wanted to watch the strange japanese movie that is "Ponyo".
And so once we had done the mad school run, I let him watch it. And he was happy:)

Awesome, I thought. I have an hour at least to myself. How much can I achieve in that length of time??? HEAPS!! But hang on, wait, something is pulling on my skirt. Oh yes, the babe thats had to give up her morning sleep in order to get through these crazy days. Oh, you dont want to watch Ponyo too??? Shame that :)

And so Amahli and I found some things just for her to do.

I started with a sensory box that I filled with blue stones and some dinosaurs.

She loved running her hand through the stones for quite awhile before setting up her dinosaurs in a line ( yep, another anal liner upperer) ( so like her mum and sister).
The dinosaurs suddenly came to life and started roaring which I just about fell over backwards, and then I was handed one to play too :)



I got out some painting to do next.



Now this little one has a tendency to eat the colours of the rainbow every time I put paint out for them so I just used food colouring ( blue, red and yellow) and put cotton buds with them as its easy to use for little chubby fingers. She loved doing this, and also chewing the end of the cotton bud.... I began taking all the paint pots away and when she pointed to one, I said the colour before handing it to her ( I put the colour of the food colouring in the same colour as the pots for more visual colour recognising). By the end of her painting she was saying "Boo?" for blue each time she wanted me to pass it to her. It became a great game and was almost as fun as the painting itself :)




Into lines at the moment... still they seem to stretch way beyond the paper, lucky its easy to clean :)




She was still raring to create once we had finished painting so I got her out one last acitvity before lunch.
On ebay, at the beginning of last year, I found these stickers.

Great for fine motor development, hand eye coordination and patience!

The are made from foam and are a really cheap, fun way to keep kids entertained when you dont want a lot of mess. These foam ones are great for little fingers as they dont fold over as normal stickers do and are fairly easy to pull the backing off. I got out our animal ones and began to pass them to her to stick on.

Trouble is, I no where near keeping up with demand. She had an absolutely wonderful time sticking these on. It was a fairly tricky thing to do for her... I would stick the animal to her thumb, she then would try and get it off with both hands and then had to stick it down. It was great for her concentration and patience. We talked about each animal as I passed it to her and she then copied the sounds each animal made. 25 minutes later, all the stickers were gone and it was lunch time, so I left her to finish.

She discovered it was almost as fun to pull them all off again :)

It wasnt until late that night that I realised I had a cow and a horse stuck to my butt... how long had they been there? Who knows??? Quite possibly they had travelled to school, the shops and a 45 minute walk around our streets :)