I know some of you will think I am exaggerating, but when Caroline was just over two weeks old I told David she looked bored. And she did. I went out that day and bought a Fisher-Price Rainforest Melodies and Lights Deluxe Gym
From the time she was tiny, she always wanted to be held and carried around. Not swaddled. She hated that. Not held on our lap. Not put in a seat where she could look around. Carried around upright. She wanted to be on the move and see everything.
We rocked her to sleep every night for a long, long, long time. Her spirited mind was too busy to allow her to self-soothe and she needed the assistance to fall sleep.
When she was around two, we would put her down for a nap with books to look at. After a while, we would go in her room and find her asleep sitting up. She would not lay down. She would go until her battery literally ran out.
From the earliest weeks Caroline craved variety and wasn’t much interested in stopping. I didn’t fully understand it at the time although it became obvious that she was not wired like other babies I read about.
I have to laugh when I see all of these busy bag ideas on Pinterest. Don’t get me wrong. They are super cute. Like a good mom I created a few things like that for Caroline and it was a total waste of my time. I would spend an hour creating something and she would be done with it in literally thirty seconds with almost zero interest in picking it up again. After all the hours and hours one would invest in making lots of busy bags, do you know how much total time we would have gotten out of them? I would guess about three minutes tops.
Caroline would have done it once and maybe done it a second time.
After that… pffft.
Been there, done that, and time to move on (with corresponding look of boredom or almost disdain that her mother would even suggest doing something again).
She’s now eight and completely into Minecraft.
And I’m pretty sure I know why.
It is never-ending variety. It’s always changing. There’s always something new to do or make or discover.
It feeds her craving.
If you have a little one who craves variety and leaves you feeling like you can never come up with enough new things for her to do without breaking the bank and/or driving yourself nuts in the process… I hear you.
I totally get it.
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Encouragement For Parents Of Differently-Wired Children
Wow, this sounds just like my kid. The week before she turned one, I was due to fly 20 hours alone with her, halfway around the world. I was terrified of running out of stuff for her to do. I think most of my hand luggage (and still to this day) went to “new things to occupy the child so she doesn’t drive me crazy for 19 hours”.
Tammy – Oh my word. Twenty hours on a plane with Caroline at age one? I couldn’t even imagine what that would have been like. We didn’t allow Caroline to watch TV until age two, but I think I would have loaded every Baby Einstein DVD available onto a device! LOL!
I have a doughter like Caroline too.. Now looking with a smile to busy bags quiet books montessori trays in My pinterest boards.. Every activity ends at least 5 minutes.. i am a computer science teacher and i suggest Caroline Scratch programming scratch.mit.edu İ think she would love it 🙂 or code.org website
This is my son to a T. This is so my son! I struggle, because if I don’t find things for him to do to keep that mind busy, he always does, and usually it involves something being broken or destroyed. (Not on purpose – he is just curious.) Today’s mishaps included nocking a stack of boxes in the garage down because he wanted to see something at the top, and locking us all out of the garage (and consequently the car – we missed our trip to the zoo 🙁 ) Because he was curious how the locks worked. Once he figures something out though, he is totally done. I struggle with knowing how to approach toys and things. There are so many things I know he would love – like the cool laser maze I see so many homeschoolers getting, but I know if he figures it out once or twice, he will be done playing with it the normal way, start deconstructing it to figure out how it works, and then the money is just gone. I know this curiosity and quickness is a good thing, but it is totally exhausting! I CAN’T KEEP UP!