obstacle course

M loves to run, jump, and play. Something we're working on at two and a half is following directions. Those two things made an obstacle course a pretty great morning activity on a rainy Monday. 

You could set this up any way with whatever you have around your house. It took me about 5 minutes to get it ready for M.  Our course included:

- crawl under the blanket covered table

- step over the golf clubs on blocks

- throw the frisbee into the box

- go through the tunnel

- hop on the colored circles down the hall

M loved this and did it several times. It also gave me some ideas for future activities (I loved the colored spot hopping). Another key piece was that some things were either new or a little hard for M. The frisbee part was hard but he tried again and again with a smile on his face. We will definitely do this again with different variations on the obstacles. 

box tunnels

We're in the midst of moving.  Luckily we have an extended closing because M gets as much satisfaction from unpacking boxes as I do from packing them.  It leaves us with a lot of boxes on our hands.  What's more fun for a one-year old than unpacking things Mommy has packed?  Crawling through box tunnels!  This is a really simple one - take an unconstructed box, open it up, and lean it against something so it doesn't collapse (we used the couch).  He had a ball crawling back and forth (and it gave us a name for our blog).

We also rolled the ball through and pushed the truck through and sometimes did both.

Why we loved box tunnels....
baby: novelty
mommy: exploration & creativity, lots and lots of crawling makes for a tired baby :-)

M's age when we played: 10 months, 3 weeks