By utilising their imagination, even the most menial tasks can be completed with exuberant excitement.
Take cooking dinner for example, put an apron on the child and get them to do it with you, talk them through the process so they feel involved and pretend they are a chef in a top restaurant.
The process might take twice as long but they will be amused and a lot more likely to finish their meal!!
Another great way to make the boring brilliant is to make it in to a competition. This works particularly well when there is more than one child. You aren’t just tidying up the pens, you are having a tidying up the pens race, can you clean up all the pens in under a minute? Ready, steady, gooooo.... and the pens are cleared in double-speed. Drawing on sibling’s competitive nature can be particularly useful when trying to tire them out.
Make them have running races in the garden, or swimming races in the pool. If something is a competition they will try twice as hard at it and for twice as long, and the bonus is the more tired the children become the more relaxation time for you. I like to think of my day as an hour full-on and an hour off, obviously not literally, as the beauty of children is that the only thing you can predict them to be is unpredictable, but if you provide and hour of full, action and enthusiasm then the children will burn themselves out and this will happily be followed by an hour of sedate colouring, vegging or quietly playing (hopefully), but don’t get too comfortable like this as it will only ever be for enough time to recharge their batteries and then the Duracell bunnies will be bouncing off the walls once more.
So there we are.
The best way to handle children over the summer holidays is to be completely and utterly, totally ACE- Attentive, Creative and Enthusiastic!