Home is where the heart is.

Playtime


There is something soothing about being at home, having your three children with you, hearing them playing together. My children, despite sometimes possessing a social calendar that could give Madonna’s daughter a run for her money, are decidedly homebodies and I am proud of them for being so.

S will be ten later this year. I is nearly 7 this week and little T is all of 2 and a half going on twenty. My happiest, most contented moments are time spent at home- writing, reading poetry, decorating, but especially and mostly, watching and listening to my children interact and play with each other.

Three days ago, they had converted a corner of our open living room, into a ‘hospital’ cranny where they played ‘Doctor Doctor.” Little T played the resident patient. S the eldest was the doctor and little I was her helper/nurse. They had real life syringes minus the needles and had filled up a Tupperware tumbler of Ribena pretending to be medicine. They seemed to be having the time of their lives as I went in as ‘visitor’. The ‘patient’ had several ailments, from a broken leg, to dengue fever to H1N1 and yet was happy and compliant to be wrapped up and fussed over. They used their own bandannas as bandages. Little T loved the meds as it was sweet and syrupy and icy. Yum! I’d love to be a patient too if the meds were always Ribena. That’s kids thinking smart as they knew Mummy wouldn’t consent to random drinking of Ribena!

It’s their Easter school holidays now and despite have spent a sophisticated weekend across the causeway on the republic at a world-class theme park and having spent precious time with their cousins there, they are happiest at home. They truly are.

They love playing in the various spaces they can find around our home, a nook in the attic that now resembles a warehouse( time for a garage sale!) or they find the space under the TV cabinet in my room fascinating, for it acts as their trench when they play pretend war-fare. With all their stuffed animals, their bedroom gets transformed into a mega zoo. Sometimes I see and hear them on the back patio where they breed guppies and play horses and cowboys together.

Although they are essentially new-age techie kids- urging us parents to use I-phones so they too can use the apps, using Macbooks in school, are real adept with making power-point presentations even for their own little home projects and they know what Youtube is, we don’t let them have their own computers yet, at least not yet. Though Daddy has a first gen PSP, they don’t. No Nintendo DS. No Xbox. No Wii. Little I told me that she wouldn’t want a Nintendo anyway as she preferred to sit down and write poems. That’s her being very political correct at seven. :)

Are we depriving them of what’s out there digitally? I hope not!

Despite the age and gender differences between them, they play well together and I feel blessed and grateful. Today they have found a new game. The two older girls have decided to design clothes out of their old baby clothes. The eldest has drawn structured designs on paper, and no. 2 is helping her. I don’t mind that my Persian rugs are full of their cloth cuttings for I would not like to impede their creativity in any way. Little T is busy making paper cuts to model the designs of his sister’s creations. Who knows, there may be a fashion designer in the making!

I must admit that I am the laziest mum on earth when it comes to supposed artistic and creative kits. I almost rue birthday and Xmas pressies where the whole kit is ready for you to assemble so I try to hide them from the kids. I am such a sloth when it comes to projects like that despite being a teacher. Perhaps it is because I am a teacher, I despise such ‘ready to make’ kits. I would rather see creativity outside the box- Ribena as medicine, old baby clothes transformed into new fashion designs that will make Stella McCartney gape, or the ruler tied up as a gun, or two lolly sticks turned into a cross for a dead hamster’s tomb.

As for myself, I miss playing games like 7 stones, Chinese jump rope(spell:dacing), masak masak and even a simple game my primary friends and I created, called sand, sea, water, land, etc.

Although I think the new digital toys are funky, cool and so uber-chic, I’d prefer to see my kids play a game of ‘Teacher Teacher’ with a real blackboard anytime, rather than stay glued for ages on a computer screen, being easy prey for a pedophile predator. Call me an old- fashioned Mummy but home is where the heart is and where the best ‘games’ are played.

Digital Mummy I am, but not when it comes to good old-fashioned make-believe.

N.B. My kids aren’t always angels like this, by the way!