On Sunday nights Dave and I have started a routine of parallel play. We sit together at the dining room table. He works on his projects, I work on mine. The boys sleep. We listen to episodes of This American Life and drink small (me) or large (Dave) glasses of beer.
Our family is not really a family of talkers. Andrew was very late to talk, and is still behind his peers in his language development. It looks like Isaac will also wait off a little before having much to say (Isaac often curiously looks at Tess, who is 6 months old, as she babbles away. We guess he's wondering what she could possibly have to say already.). And we think that our kids are just doing what they see their parents do. And what we don't do, is sit around and talk. And so neither do they.
What we do do, is sit around and do. All of us. We do and we make. We make dresses and databases and towers and messes. Isaac is currently perfecting his mess making. He is really getting quite good at it.
Anyway, last Sunday night, we engaged in parallel play and I have three more pages of my California book to show for it.
5 comments:
This helps me understand why Seth and I get very little done around here. We talk talk and talk and read and talk. Brice talks all the time, too, though we cannot understand much of it.
:)
"I would love to go back there" (Big Sur)
An EXCELLENT idea. ;)
I love that photo of the tree trunk with all the rings. Lovely.
I love that you call this parallel play. I'm not much of a talker, either, so looking back, I realize that most of my close friendships involved "parallel play". Melanie and I were such good roommates in college because we liked to be with each other, but we were often just doing things and there wasn't pressure to talk unless we felt like it.
I love that I've been to your apartment and can picture you guys doing htis. And I love that you listen to "This American Life" while you do it.
I want to have parallel playtime!
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