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Tucker is turning into a big boy before my eyes. He walks and talks (okay, not really... babbles is more like it) and now... plays with playdoh! I cooked him up his first batch of playdoh the other day and wrestled with the cosmic question: blue or green? I settled on blue, and off we were to the races.
I'm not sure he entirely understood it. He did figure out it wasn't food. He didn't figure out it wasn't food for Ben.
I've been reading a book by John Rosemond (a child psychologist who writes weekly newspaper columns that Austin's dad clips for us) called Making the Terrible Twos Terrific (when he says "twos" he means starting at about 18 months, of course). Anyway, so far it's about the best book on child rearing I've read, apart from the silly title. Braxton White's The First Three Years is also super good.
One of Dr. Rosemond's pieces of advice is to box up a lot of your child's toys. Apparently, with a huge array of toy choices, especially ones that have relatively little flexibility, kids don't know what to do and get bored. I see that in Tucker. When he plays in his dad's office, where there are two toys (matchbox cars, and a train) he plays for forever. When he plays in the sunroom where the bulk of his toys are, he often flits from thing to thing, and usually doesn't take anything off the shelf. It's like the choice is overwhelming.
Dr. Rosemond suggests going around and mentally rating your child's toys on a 1-10 scale for their play value. Something like playdoh which inspires the imagination and can be anything would rate really high, something like our plastic talking Curious George that sings one song when you press one button, would rate low. He says box up anything that has less than a 8 in play value.
So I boxed up two huge boxes of toys yesterday. Mostly it was the things he doesn't play with anyway, and already, I think the toy variety is less overwhelming. I'm going to rotate through the boxed up toys, over time. I'll let you know how this affects Tucker's ability to self-entertain.
