I've run across a couple of discussions in the bloggosphere lately about how much attention mums should be paying to their kids. This really hit home for me today oddly enough, or perhaps as a consequence of having it on my brain, I don't know!
Hazel's going through a phase of demanding that I "keep [her] company" - I must be in the room with her, and of preference, giving her my undivided attention or even better, playing with her. I don't mind this to an extent, I like paying attention to her and I feel that as an only child she perhaps has more call on my time than if she had a sibling to harass or be harassed by. But I feel that there must be limits, that I should be able to do my own thing for at least short periods of time. She disagrees. Both of us got quite petulant today at various points when our wishes were thwarted. I had some idea of getting back to the quilt, but I quite literally couldn't put up with the whining and complaints about how long I was taking and when was I coming back into the living room and gave in.
I really don't know how much crafting/me time I can reasonably expect to get with her at this age, perhaps I'm being over-optimistic for a four year old; but on the other hand I have absolutely no intention of being at her beck and call the rest of my life. She needs to learn to entertain herself at some point! She actually can, for quite long periods of time, but generally only when she realises that she's not going to get any joy out of me for whatever reason. Is it simply a matter of forcing her to rely on her own imagination and resources and getting her out of the habit of automatically turning to me for entertainment, or do I need to accept that I'm still pretty much the centre of her world and just suck it up for awhile longer? It seems from other bloggers that there is crafting to be done during the day with kids in the house, or am I allowing the unreality in blogs to colour my perception of reality and my situation? Bottom line is that I'd like to sew and stuff in daylight hours - even if just to figure out fabric colours!
