We have one but the walk back is uphill cross the entrance to a highway so the crossing is laborious and also unnerving. He, of course, does not like the stroller even though we have an amazing one. The sidewalks here make it challenging also. I.know it sounds like I’m being negative and making excuses but these are just the unique challenges of the area.
We do let him do whatever he wants that is not unsafe! Not because of anything inspired on my part, just inertia.
No not at all! That’s why I’m asking- where we lived previously (apartment, busy part of the city, urban roads) we wouldn’t be getting nearly as much time outside I don’t think. Personal circumstances matter.
When Latte has periods of stroller hate, I have to speed walk and non stop talk about things. She likes squirrel facts, the water cycle, and rehashing what we’ve done recently and what we’ll do coming up. It’s exhausting but cathartic and eventually she gets back to zen acceptance. 
Yeah I mean worst comes to worst he has a tantrum and we work through it, I guess!
I’m part of the town parent group and I have thought about posting something like “hey, any parents with kids around 2-4 that wanna be on a fb chat for playground outings?” But I’m still nervous about covid. Also internet strangers on FB… Because FB is creepy…
Currently on an outdoor outing with the tot. Made me think of a few more ideas. We will do stuff like collect pinecones and then arrange them in shapes and talk about it. Collect leaves and make a path to jump from least to leave. Find interesting rocks and make a pile/bring them home like a little kleptomaniac and add to our massive home rock pile. I’m very bad at art, but we’ll collect nature things and try to make art out of it. Or wood chips.
I just got back from a short walk with the Kiddo - the lure was to try to find a friendly neighborhood cat he’s seen twice, it’s enough to get him to walk four blocks. He decided that all the acorn caps and leaves all over the path were kitty poop and we had to jump like ninjas to get past all the obstacles. I let him lead and just walked behind him unless he was looking, then I sort of jumped and dodged around.
Oh yes, this is a good reminder. We do a lot of going to visit her favorite parked boat in the neighborhood, walking to see where will see school buses drive by, walking to see where we see a cat nap in a window, stuff like that. Also visiting specific holiday decorations, like blowup Santa‘s and blow up cats in Santa hats.
Our neighbors down the street (on the way to the sometimes-cat) have some inflatables - Skellington Jack in his Santa outfit, a Paw Patrol one, and a snowman - and Kiddo doesn’t give a rats ass. He goes to see them once a season and then he doesn’t care. I’m considering letting him “stay up” tonight to go walk to see Christmas lights at night since it’s solstice (he probably will go to bed around the normal time, honestly, I expect a short walk).
We had plastic tweezers included in the perler bead kit, and my 2-year old is having an amazing time using tweezers to pick up and sort these fluff balls, so highly recommend adding tweezer to the kit!
Also 2-year old’s new favorite toy- marble run. And why I am counting it as enrichment- because picking up the marble is good for fine motor skill, and the endless wonder of cause and effect (if I put it in this drop, it goes this way, if I put it in this one, it goes that way). We got a small one, so it was less than $20. (But no independent play- marbles are a choking hazard)
How likely is it that the marbles would go everywhere if this was unsupervised play? That’s always been the thing that dissuaded me from buying it, I don’t need more things to step on or get lost under the couch.
I think potentially high.
The marbles are contained in the marble run, and caught at the bottom, so it doesn’t distribute it on it’s own.
But marbles can roll away if dropped (ours are contained on tile, that is bordered by carpet, so they can’t go far, but would on a wood floor), and children can carry marbles to a new area (so far not a problem for us). Ours came with 60 marbles, we gave them 8.
Pro move right there.
My kids had soooo many hours of fun with marble runs. I think you should get him one!
This evening was a hot mess. Kid had so much energy he wanted to get out in destructive ways. Think when @SisterX was coming up with the label for her eldest.
At bath time I was fooling around with his ehake duplo and started banging it and singing can can
This turned into us singing can can off and on for over half an hour banging toys very very loudly. Sometimes switching the words to bang bang (but not too much because I was doing it wrong if I did too much).
I hope this works in the future because I’m not always physically up to exhausting this kids brain or body, let alone both.
Beautiful squat form!
So cute and tiny!
I can’t decide if it’s brilliant or incredibly sad, but- especially when the weather is crappy, I’ve been peppering in videos on YouTube of like, kids playing at the playground or outdoors various places. I figure if she can’t directly interact with kids she can kinda play with them 
she loves to imitate what they’re doing. Ex we’re watching this one right now-
and she helped her friends down our indoor slide too.
She also loves this one usually:
I’ve also been doing these videos with her for movement-
Dumped together two puzzles and had her sort them into categories. (She got half way then changed to grouping colors. 
Still a win). It’s nice because these Amazon puzzles are too advanced for her to put the pieces in anyway, so it’s nice to have them still have a good use now. We also use the fruit to pair to an “eating the alphabet” book.
