NZ Baby Blog

We’ve just had a month away with our 2 year old and it went really well. In part it went well because we tried to be as prepared as we could be to fight off the twin event killers - hunger and boredom.

One of our outings was to a very “grown up” pot luck lunch with about 20 ish people including 4 or so other kids ranging in age from 10mths to 8 years. Our man had some food, a bit of a play and then fell asleep on dads lap - nice - we were the envy of everyone.

One of the mums of the older children though was complaining about how her child constantly interrupts her while she’s talking at these “do’s” and so we talked about some a techniqueto teach them for for getting attention quietly - “Quiet Hands”.

You teach your child to come up and gently touch your hand when they want your attention rather than shouting at you or dragging at you. Attention is the “reward” so you need to withold the reward for behaviour you don’t want. You might start by giving attention for shout and touch, but then go only for touch. Her child was 8 so she could explain it to him.

However it got me thinking about going out with a child to essentially an adults “do” and how she really had set herself up to fail. It was a house without kids, or any outdoors, so no toys and no running space. We took our travelling suitcase with toys in it (as we had on our whole trip), and the other children fell on them with great gusto.

So I think if going out with a small, or even not so small child, to a non child friendly place where you’d like to be able to ignore them, or keep them amused with minimal intervention take…

Toys and lots of them, some suggestions are
Toys that they and other adults will want to play with like lego, trainset, cars, mechano
Toys they like to play by themselves like crayons, colouring book
Books either to be read to them or they can read themselves
For older kids then computers, games, cards, anything that some other adult will take an interest in is a good idea (so not the new fangled game boy style things unless they will just play that themselves).

How many toys to take? Well that depends on how long you want to stay with them being quiet, but I figure one toy per 20 mins or so is about right. So if you’re wanting to stay for 2 hours, you’ll need about 6 things.

For our toddler we have a suitcase called a trunky that is both a good carry case and a ride on toy which is pretty well perfect for outings.

And I guess for anyone in their 30’s-40’s who is hosting this sort of event and would like to help thier guests with kids out, stockpiling a few books and toys would be most gratefully recieved.