Stressful behaviour ..... And Relax

(Goblin is 25 months)

Goblin has had a cold for a fortnight now and sleep feels like a mere memory. This morning he woke up at 2.30 am and just would not go back to sleep. But he's not in that forlorn state where he is content to sit on my lap or snuggle up - no he's in the 'I want to play with everything loudly and make lots of mess and generally do things that will stress out my sleep deprived parents' place. 

I stuck the TV on. I swear by the "Here comes a ...." series. We have all four - Digger, Train. Tractor and Fire engine and at times like this I am quite happy to stick them on back to back. You can buy them at http://www.littlebigtv.co.uk

For the first three hours Goblin played happily with his cars. I got out the play mat I made him and all his dinky metal cars. He is really into lining them up and spent a very long time putting them all nose to tail. At least I think thats what happened - I kept falling asleep and every time I woke up there were more cars lined up.
But after a while he started to get restless. I tried getting down some of the more educational stuff from his shelves (they often suggest the morning is the best time to do that kinda stuff but maybe they aren't talking about 4am). Goblin wasn't interested and started throwing stuff around. So I found myself desperately looking for something I could do with him that would occupy him but wouldn't break things if he hurled it. 

I opted for playdough. Goblin doesn't play with playdough a lot but to my surprise he seemed really interested this morning. I have a whole bunch of animal shape cutters and I helped him roll the dough out and cut animal shapes, and then he started counting them. I buy playdough. There are lots of fab blogs with recipes for home made playdough. But I bought my playdough over a year ago and it still hasn't dried up or gone manky. And I got it from Tescos so it was super cheap, and Goblin doesn't try to eat it because it tastes disgusting. Having said that if you are less lazy than me Nuturestore have a whole ebook of playdough recipes you can download for free.

 Goblin spotted the Christmas themed eyespy bottle on the shelves. He really likes that I put a tiny train in the bottle. He wasn't particularly interested in the other objects - although when I got the object sheet down he did make an effort to find them, before going back to looking for the train. 

 And then he wanted to take the lid off. I had taped the lid down so we didn't get rainbow rice and glitter everywhere but as I already had the plastic mat down I took the lid off for him. He poured out the contents and played with the train and donkey in the rice. (And didn't start throwing it around - phew). And then he found the chunky chalks in the playdough box. He brought them over to me so I dashed upstairs and brought down his Chalkboard cubes that his Poppy made him. 

They are wooden cubes painted in blackboard chalk. They are such a brilliant and simple toy. Goblin took each one in turn, marked it up with chalk and stacked it. Observing Goblin playing nicely with things he could quite easily fling across the room made me realise his behaviour probably wasn't any worse this morning than it usually is. I was probably just more tired and my fuse was shorter. I was still very glad when at 9.30am he finally decided it was time for a nap. 

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