Game: Keepy Uppy Bandit

We know the game about keeping the balloon off the ground as “Keepy Uppy” due to the show Bluey. The father’s name is Bandit.

Photo by A.J. Spearman on Pexels.com

Setup: The same as traditional games of this sort. Inflate a balloon.

Action: Someone puts the balloon into the air. Each person hits the balloon back up into the air to keep it from touching the ground. The more acrobatic the better. Easy mode: control the balloon with soft hits so the other person can also controlled hit it.

In the episode, Bluey complains about it being too easy, so Bandit makes it harder. Fleur likes to make it harder by hitting it where I am challenged to keep it from touching the ground. Sometimes she transitions to Hard Mode after half an hour where other times she gets there after a few minutes. Sometimes she announces the change with “I am Bandit” while other times I figure it out because she’s started making it hard.

Anyway, she makes it more fun.

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Game: stuntwoman

Setup: the bed is the landing zone.

Action: I started off throwing her Superwoman style. She told me to hold her upside down and throw her. We call that variant, “Stuntwoman Extreme.”

She also loves me to spin the merry-go-round or spinner seats so fast she gets dizzy.

Game: Elsa and the Big Bad Wolf

Setup: Fleur is Elsa. I am the Big Bad Wolf. Others are various Frozen characters. Ada is Anna.

Action: this basically a chase game. I howl and try to get Elsa or others. Elsa can freeze me. Someone else can use fire to unfreeze.

I love this game because we play it in some public place with open space to run around. It gets weird looks about me howling.

Dino Rawr!

Another pretend game we play is “Dinosaur.” Basically, I am big terrible lizard chasing her.

Rules:

• I am constrained to the hallway and bedrooms.
• I roar. She screams.
• Lots of running.
• Me hiding to jump out.
• Sometimes something is a sword for defeating me.

Often the game morphs into sick dino.

This is a good activity for rainy or very cold weather .

Outside, the same game is Big, Bad Wolf where I howl and chase.

Pull-Up of Protection

After bath, Fleur wants to air dry by running away from us. We encourage her to put on the first step of getting dressed, the Pull-Up, by calling it the Pull- Up of Protection. I have not decided the bonus yet. Maybe +5 as it is powerful enough to stop us.

Of late, it has not worked so well. Maybe we need to put more effort into getting her. So she understands how powerful the bonus.

“Viking – Shield Maiden” by Danielle Pioli is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0

She has gotten too comfortable hearing us encourage her. Time to restore the fear.

Fantasy-based pretend play

“Viking – Shield Maiden” by Danielle Pioli is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0

From an article…

The study involved daily 15-minute play sessions across five weeks, in which a research assistant led 39 children aged three to five through a fantastical script, such as going to the moon. After the five week period, the pretend play kids showed greater gains in their ability to memorise lists of digits (a classic test of working memory, itself a core component of executive function) as compared with 32 age-matched children in a standard play condition, who spent their sessions singing songs and passing a ball around a circle.

The pretend play group also showed a bigger improvement on an executive function attention-shift task, which involved switching from sorting blocks by colour to shape. This result squeaked through thanks to the standard-play group’s scores actually creeping down over time as the pretend group scores crept up, but note that on its own terms, the pre-to-post change in pretend group performance wasn’t itself statistically significant. On a third executive function measure – “inhibition of responses” (children had to follow a tricky instruction to label a nighttime scene as day, and a daytime scene as night) – there was no effect of the pretend play.

Fantasy-based pretend play is beneficial to children’s mental abilities. Research Digest, the British Psychological Society

I am enjoying this playful period where Fleur tells me stories. Getting more into this kind of play excites me. It is what I remember doing a lot of as a child. And even as a teenager, I played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons, even being a Dungeon Master most of the time for one group of friends.

Rock A Bye Baby

This was never my go-to calming song. But, now that Fleur has her own babies (dolls), she sings this to them.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

I have taken of late to holding her and singing it to her. Naturally, as this is for fun, at fall, I drop fake her and catch her for the next line. The laughter is the full on belly ones from when she was a baby.

Today, she started singing to her doll and came to ask me to do it. I am so glad we have found this game.