YOU’VE got the children: everyone else has got ludicrous ideas about entertaining them. Here are a few activities your kids will abandon well before the end:
Play a board game
An age-appropriate board game is a great way to teach kids about following rules and learning to lose. Sadly these are not lessons children want to learn. Either you’ll win and they’ll cry, they’ll win and piss you off, or more likely they will simply go to the loo and not return. Different counters and tokens will be found scattered for weeks.
Video call a relative
Catching up with family members virtually is a great way to nurture precious relationships, except for young children, for whom it is an opportunity to run in and out of shot shouting that they don’t want to talk then grabbing your phone and running away with it. Follow up the call with a lying text about how your child is ‘not really into screens’.
Fold laundry together
Involving your children in household chores is a great way to feel productive and teach them some valuable life skills. Until kids tip clean laundry all over the floor, roll around in it, lick it, chuck it down the stairs and then accidentally piss on it. While they watch the iPad, you’ll be reloading the washing machine.
Make a time capsule
Time passes so quickly when you’re raising children, in theory, so making a time capsule is a perfect way to capture precious moments. Children, however, have no concept of time beyond how long they have to cry before you let them have another biscuit. But it’s worth going to all the trouble so they can demand you dig it up tomorrow.
The Big Garden Birdwatch
Touted as an activity by grandparents who either do not remember raising children or were able to perform the level of near-inhuman sorcery required to make a preschooler stare at an empty garden, waiting for birds. Counting birds is not just beyond a child’s capabilities, it’s beyond most adults. Write ‘blackbird, magpie, sparrow’ then f**k off indoors.
