What to Play When You Don’t Feel Like Playing
There’s a now very famous Substack called “What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking.” The author, Caro Chambers, created it to help people—largely working moms—get good food on the table with minimal effort or fuss.
It resonated. All over the country (the world?), parents want to make family meals that are both tasty and don’t require endlessly chopping or hovering over the stove for an hour. But then it’s 5 o’clock, and there’s no dinner plan in place, and the fridge is simultaneously full of specialty condiments and empty of main ingredients. You’re tired and brain-dead and need someone to please, please, just tell you what to cook. Enter “What to Cook.”
While I also struggle on the cooking front, I have an analogous daily struggle that looms larger in my life. Every day, at 2:45pm, I take over the childcare for my toddler. On a good day, I’ve thought ahead of time about how we’ll pass the afternoon. But most days, my watch reads 2:40, and my brain goes, “So, what are you going to do with him?”
I’m a little (or a lot) tired. I can see the day stretching ahead of me—another 5 hours with my kids, whom I love, but who often place significant demands on my attention, emotional stability, and physical stamina. I also feel a little ashamed that, yet again, I didn’t plan ahead.
I know what older generations would say: modern-day parents stress too much about entertaining their kids. Bring them shopping with you! Live your life, and take them along for the ride!
And sure, that’s probably good for a lot of people. But I strongly suspect that the people who give this advice don’t have neurodivergent kids. On some days, mine are perfectly content riding along in a shopping cart at Trader Joe’s. But just as often, the store can completely overwhelm their senses. When every outing brings the chance of a meltdown, “mommy and me” shopping can be a daunting prospect.
Moreover, sometimes I just want to sit down and join my toddler in his world. And because I have a brain that desperately craves novelty, I want to do that in a way that isn’t dreadfully repetitive, which seems to be the speciality of toddlers. (My son is perfectly content to spend each afternoon playing Marble Run, which includes a healthy dose of accidentally knocking down his creations and crying until we fix them. Pass.)
The other day, while on a short solo hike, the thought popped into my head that what I need isn’t so much a last-minute cooking guide as a last-minute play guide. Nothing as structured as most of the Pinterest posts out there, and nothing as pricey as a Lovevery kit (which, again, gets a little old after you’ve played with it for a few days).
The Substack I need? “What to Play When You Don’t Feel Like Playing.”
Since no one has written it for me, I figured I’d try my hand at it — to remind myself of activities I’ve enjoyed in the past, to give myself some much-needed intentionality and structure around planning future activities, and to — hopefully — help out some other parents along the way.
I’m starting with one activity that has recently worked for me and my toddler. It’s the holy trinity: cheap, uses stuff most of us parents have lying around the house, and requires little to no prep.
Without further ado, here’s What to Play When You Don’t Feel Like Playing, round one.
Play Doh Planets
Is your kid into planets? My toddler is obsessed. But I suspect this activity would work for most young kids, regardless of whether they’ve yet hit their Space Obsession stage.
What you need: Eight different mini-Play Doh colors. You can find mini tins on Amazon, your local toy store, those cheap bins at the front of Target, etc. Or you can split one ball of Playdoh into several chunks and dye each with a different shade of food coloring.
What to do: Set each of the different Play Doh colors out in a row. Roll each into a small ball. Tell your kid that they’re planets. See what happens.
Variations:
- Ask your kid to name each planet. A refresher, in case you want to use real names: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune.
- Try to match the Play Doh planets to their real-world colors. Some easy ones to start with: Earth is blue (add green and/or white if you’re feeling fancy). Mars is red/orange. Uranus and Neptune are blue-ish. In my house, the others are permitted to be different colors, depending on the day. We generally make Jupiter brownish and Mercury a gray color, but you do you.
- Pretend an asteroid is crashing into a planet! Your finger is the asteroid. Smush the planet. Cry. Yell. Rue the day that the asteroid destroyed your home. Your kid will be appreciate the theatrics.
- Smush all the planets. Bye-bye, solar system.
- Roll the planets across the floor. See which one goes the farthest.
- Have your kid throw you a planet. Legitimately try to catch it. This will likely have you sprawling out on the floor, high-school-volleyball style, wishing you were wearing kneepads. Your kid will shout, “AGAIN!” Do it again.
- Pretend you’re the sun. Tell your kid to run around you in circles like a planet. If your kid can handle it emotionally, tell them that eventually the sun will get so big that it swallows up Mercury, Venus, and maybe even Earth. Grab your kid and pretend to swallow them. They will enjoy it, while also learning about the inevitable end of life as we know it. Educational!
Let me know if you do Play Doh planets this week—and, if so, what variations you come up with.
Go play!
