There is no way that I am going to sit here and claim to be the Toddler Whisperer, this whole mom thing is so new to me. Everyday I wake up ready to take on the world and every night I go to bed feeling as if I fought and lost 9 rounds against Damien Trainor.  That being said, occasionally I have an idea that not only sounds good but actually works the way I imagined it would work.

JoJo spent last weekend in Florida taking care of some football business, and that meant the kid and I were left on our own.  I will be honest, I was a little overwhelmed at the thought of just her and I alone for an entire weekend.  Since I have started working full-time it seems like I have little to no time to work on my business.  I am up til the wee hours of the night trying to finish projects and then I start my day before the sun ever shows himself.  I usually have the weekends to play catch up but this particular weekend I knew there would be no “extra” time.

Aubrey is going through some serious issues now and she is having a really hard time coping with me not being with her everyday, that’s a post of its on.  I did not want to it worse by having her playing alone in her room while I worked but there were a couple of pressing items that I had to finished.  During our playtime I would excuse myself and say “Mommy needs 15 minutes and then we can play some more.” She would reply OK but within a few minutes she was standing at my office door begging me to come back and play with her.  This was when I realized toddlers totally suck at time.

On Saturday, as I was entering hour 2 of playing dollhouse, I started thinking how I could give Aubrey some control over our time, make it fun and maybe even make a lesson out of it.  That’s when it hit me and I asked “Do you want to go to Target?”.  The answer was “YES”, seriously though the answer to that question is always YES!!

Once we got to Target I headed straight to the cooking aisle and grabbed a timer, we then did some other shopping because after all we were in Target and I am not one to waste a good trip to Target.

When we got home I sat Aubrey down and I showed her how the timer worked.  I let her listen to the buzzer, I let her turn the dial and we went over our numbers together.  I explained to her that this was our new game that the two of us would play together.  I asked her what she wanted to do first and she told me play dollhouse, we have really gotten our money’s worth with that dollhouse.  I told her to turn the dial to 30 and we would play until the buzzer sounded, once the buzzer sounded then we would move on to a new activity.

This actually worked!

Ever 30 minutes we would move on to a new activity alternating between together time and alone time. There were times that she completely forgot about watching the timer and then there were times that she would come running in right before it went off screaming “IT’S TIME!” It didn’t matter to me because either way I was getting 30 minutes of time.  Not only was I able to catch up on some work but I finished the laundry, cleaned the kitchen and my bathrooms.  When JoJo came home on Sunday he just looked around in shock and asked “Did she stay at your mom’s this weekend?”