The BOX

Have you read Christina Katerina and The Box? I loved that story as a child, and I still love it! About a month ago I noticed an offer on Freecycle for a "very large box". Of course I jumped at the chance! We barely got it home, it was so big, but oh it has been worth it. :)

The kids turned it into a fort.



A few weeks later, it became a cliff, off of which they took flying leaps of great daring. When the cliff collapsed, it became an slide (sometimes for penguins - headfirst).



Once the slide fell apart, they turned it into a chasm,



and then a new kind of fort.



Like Christina Katerina's mother, sometimes I would like my space back. But really, I love watching their creativity and active play, and it is worth giving up the living room. :)

Play Time

Playing with big-little boys is very different from playing with little-little boys or babies. With little ones, my days were full of small interactions. Read "Goodnight Moon" or "The Big Red Barn". Stack a tower of blocks for him to knock over. Build a train track out of Brio. Round up the cars and trucks and turn on the water for "car wash" time. Little boys have short attention spans, and my interactions with them were often comparably short.

It isn't that way anymore. Now we're reading chapter books with Jonathan, and Thomas asked to start his own chapter book this morning as well. "Mommy, will you help me build this lego set?" means nearly an hour spent hunched over an instruction manual, searching for miniscule pieces that (I'm assured) will eventually become something "really awesome!" Games are also longer: Josiah will play Candyland for 30+ minutes; Jonathan and Thomas will play Sorry for twice that long. I put my foot down when they wanted to start playing Risk - no five hour games for this mama, no thank you!

(Board games - even short ones - are a cross that I have to regularly offer to Jesus. I can't stand them.)

There are wonderful things that come with these growing-up playtimes. Snuggling while reading together can be one of the best parts of the day. And I love seeing the focus and the creativity that abounds during lego play. Yet there is difficulty for me in this change of daily pacing. It can be hard to turn away from whatever I'm doing (laundry, dishes, my own book!) when I know that it won't be a short interaction, but rather an hour devoted to something that probably wasn't on my mental agenda. Setting my plans aside to be really present with my boys for extended play is a new kind of sacrifice of self, and I'm not very good at it yet. But it feels like the kind of thing that God is using to grow me up, too.