Balls on the Stairs

Sometimes, it's not easy to come up with ideas to entertain a three-year every minute of every day for an entire weekend. You have your standard fallbacks, like playing with dinosaurs, building trains, whacking each other with foam swords, or chasing dada around the upstairs. But if you overplay those cards, then they get stale, and your toddler won't want to do them for very long. So, it takes a constant infusement of new ideas to keep him interested. Honestly, I have no idea how the daycare manages to do this every single day for an entire year. And they have eight kids to do this with.

Stuck with this exact dilemma today, I decided to let Troy throw his little plastic ball pit balls down the stairs. But to his surprise and delight, I got the laundry basket and filled it up with balls, so he could send them all down at once in a rainbow river. Then, we'd pick them all up, and we'd do it again. At one point, I even laid down on the stairs, so he could dump the balls and watch them wash over me. He particularly enjoyed this, especially when they hit me in the head.

When he got done dumping the balls, I asked him, "Was that satisfying?" Troy smiled a huge smile and said, "Yes, that was satisfying."