Milestone: Learning To Tie Laces

My plan for today involved only 2 things - a corner table and my office laptop. Due to the torrential rains that we've experienced for the past 3 days, the area where my company is situated was severely flooded and we were advised not to come to work anymore last Monday. Had it been any other week, I would have jumped in glee. Who wouldn't appreciate an extra day to spend with her family?

But it's the end of August (in our financial books) and a day or two missed translates to piles and piles of paperwork that I will have to catch up and make up for during the same week. And it just so happens 2 public holidays were set less than a week apart.The more that I gotta work extra hard (and maybe put in more hours).

Good thing I'm finally allowed to work from home these days so I only had to condition the kid that I cannot be disturbed for a few hours during the day because I needed to get some things done. Good thing, her school also declared that they are taking the entire week off so I had no reason to be implementing gadget-free school day rule. 

Just to be sure, I woke up extra early today so I'll have a few hours headstart before the kid regains full energy at breakfast. 

Being a working parent and actually bringing in work to the home sucks big time. But I guess, it helps if you poured extra efforts in her earlier years to train her to be independent. These days, apart from the non-stop craving for mommy and daddy's attention, the kid can pretty much do a lot of things on her own. And that includes feeding herself, dressing up, entertaining herself mostly through pretend plays (yes complete with a script and an imaginary playmate to boot). So the gadgets remain my last resort even during days like today.

She really can survive the day without me asking how she's doing but being at home and not doing my parenting duties always leaves me guilt-ridden. Luckily today, I finished work early and we still had the few hours of the day to bond. I wanted to do an art project but ditched it when I realized I was just too exhausted to gather materials to use. 

Then I remembered I'd been planning to try to teach her again how to tie laces. Last December, I attempted to teach her that but I guess she wasn't ready because she was losing patience every time the ribbons would jumble up. Well, she still has a lot to learn on being patient but when I took out the P20 pair of laces (mahal pa actually because I bought it from the supermarket) that I bought a few weeks back she was eager to be taught. 

I remember a book about tying shoelaces that I saw in NBS recently and thought I can maybe do something similar to it. At no cost. Of course the book came with a story but we're experts at that already, we can always make up new ones. We just need the props.

So I got a pair of scissors and a cereal box from my recyclables stash, traced the little kid's cute feet on it, cut two pairs of feet and punch 3 holes each on the sides. Viola! We now have 'shoes' that we can practice tying laces on.

She grew really impatient in her first 2 attempts. But I remained calm and assuring her it's an easy task to do. After 3 repeats, she grabbed the laces again and was able to make a loop and tied the laces tight! Yay! She seemed so proud of her achievement she gladly replayed the same to her dad and ate Inday.

Now...it's probably time for us to get rid of those velcro P.E. shoes and get her a pair of decent laced rubber shoes. Agree?