I turned our home into a playground during lockdown: one parent’s guide to keeping kids happy indoors – The Guardian

Lockdown meant reimagining the home through new eyes (picture posed by models).Photograph: wundervisuals/Getty Images

Before any of us had heard the phrase lockdown, my parenting style was very much of the Lets go variety. Lets go ... to the park/cinema/museum/anywhere that will get us out of this small flat and make us feel like were not stifling your childhoods with our inability to afford a garden.

As Spain and Italy locked down with draconian measures, we could feel the panic rising: how would my partner, Steven, and I keep seven-year-old Betty and 18-month-old Rosa occupied with no childcare, no family or friends, no private outside space and no throw-money-at-the-problem excursions while trying to hold down our own jobs?

The answer unfolded during the first week of lockdown when I told my mum how frustrated Betty was by Hurricane Rosa, the toddler who destroys everything in her wake, shoving small toys in her mouth at superfast speed. Mum suggested we empty Bettys higher bookshelves so she could use them to play with her Sylvanian Families in peace. For the uninitiated, these are toy figures of rabbits, bears and mice who have homes, furniture whole communities in fact.

What started as a basic school soon evolved into an ambitious recreation of Malory Towers-meets-Hogwarts, with a dormitory, head teachers office, infirmary, canteen and swimming pool complete with tap water. As Betty became ever more invested, so did I, and together we became increasingly imaginative, turning my bedside cabinet into a luxury department store with a rigged-up LED night light and mood music from Classic FM. We then moved on to restaurants and bakeries using bits and pieces I bought from every corner of the internet (day or night, I was able to check out securely using PayPal): so we had cakes made from Blu Tack, sequins for biscuits, scraps of material for tablecloths.

In a world that felt as if it was spinning out of control, there was real comfort in having total mastery of our own tiny domain.

It was then that the lightbulb moment struck: if we were going to be locked down, then we needed to totally rethink the small world that we were living in rather than mourning the bigger loss. From seeing everyday items through new eyes to rearranging furniture, we realised our flat had so much potential that wed never appreciated before.

For Rosa, who was literally climbing the walls and coffee table, we dragged the cushions off the sofa, blankets from drawers and piled them in the middle of the floor so she could face plant on them repeatedly without upsetting the downstairs neighbours. Inspired by fiveminutemum.com, we then invested in bubbles, pipe cleaners and tiny pom-poms that she could sort and play with.We even bought some toddler-friendly crayons at 5am one morning, checking out quickly with PayPal while simultaneously warming up milk and manically trying to keep Rosa occupied. Theres nothing like a pandemic to give you a newfound delight in the breadth of stuff you can buy.

Each room, which before felt confining, opened up with possibilities. Rosa was in her element in an empty bath playing with pots, pans and beakers plus a jug of water while I sat on the bathroom floor catching up on family admin for a full 20 minutes. When I was in the kitchen cooking, she helped by threading dry spaghetti through the holes in a colander. It not only kept her happy, it did wonders for her hand-to-eye coordination.

Meanwhile, Betty inspired by how-to-draw videos by childrens illustrator Rob Biddulph found a new power in creating her own bedroom art gallery and started to render friends and family in paper form so that she could play with them an idea both lovely and heartbreaking. A friend lent us their tent, which we popped up in the sitting room so Betty and Steven could have an indoor sleepover one Saturday night. Lucky Steven.

If this all sounds too Waltons to be true then it is. Its not the full story: Betty also now has an addiction to the computer game Stardew Valley and Rosas fifth word is telly, which she shouts repeatedly as she shoves the remote control at our heads.

Were not nailing this thing by a long stretch, as our downstairs neighbours will attest to. But weve realised that the external draw of the organised fun isnt always the answer; that actually unleashing creativity helped us through a tricky and confusing time. Our imagination was fuelled by theirs and vice versa. I hope its something we remember to take with us into the future.

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I turned our home into a playground during lockdown: one parent's guide to keeping kids happy indoors - The Guardian