A few minutes to delight a toddler

The babies are currently only sleeping forty minutes at a time during the day. I've tried patting, rocking, feeding, letting cry, not letting cry, more awake time, less awake time. Ninety percent of the time I end up pushing them in the pram, whether it be backwards and forwards in the house or actually going for a walk. It's certainly not a great situation but at least they are getting sleep.  Fortunately these are not my first children and I know that whatever is going on with them, it's only for a little while.

On the flipside, it is unfortunate these are not my first children because the person suffering most from the attention the babies are demanding is my toddler. There are only so many walks she can go on and no matter how hard I try, it is quite difficult to do much else besides push a pram, particularly a rather heavy tandem pram. I am, however, learning to really make the most of every moment we have together.

On Monday we were walking home with the roadtrain - boys each in a capsule and Miss 2 on the kickboard at the back. She was very interested in all the puddles around and she wanted to stop and play. My natural instinct was to distract her from this idea and rush us home so I could get on with the feed, bath, bed mission in hopes that the babies would be done and dusted in time to get a few jobs done before starting the feed, bath, bed process again for Miss 2. As I turned the corner onto our street though I realised that if the boys were in the pram they would probably stay asleep or at least happy a bit longer. What harm would it do to let her have a bit of a play in the puddles? So instead of rushing home and focusing on the babies, we rushed home, put on our gumboots and went back out. We both had a splash, Miss 2 fell over, got back up, giggled, kicked, ran, got dirty, loved every moment.  It started to rain and we headed home.  I looked at my watch, we'd only been out ten minutes but it was the best ten minutes of my day. She was happy, I was happy and the babies were still asleep. Ten minutes was all it took.