The day our children delighted in rags

As a career mom, I don’t often get the chance to just hang around home for more than two days at a time. This week, due to a mix of circumstances, I was home for five days straight, mainly with my husband–usually the stay-at-home-dad–away at work.

The first day was great – I even managed a successful mall outing (I didn’t know that was possible with energetic preschoolers). The next day I actually got to have a coffee date with a friend. By the fourth day, things were deteriorating. Straight from a parent’s nightmare…barefoot, pantless two-year-old running away across the entire grocery store, back-to-back meltdowns over forgotten water cups, son obsessed with pouring his own juice and rearranging the toolboxes, my own health being poor. Let’s face it, I was ready to go back to work by the end of the day.

So when I unexpectedly had a fifth day off, I decided we’d better make it more interesting. In the afternoon, I spontaneously decided we would make sock puppets, as I had seen some when flipping through a library book called Creative Illustration Workshop for Mixed-Media Artists. We each picked a sock and some scraps, and I started making puppets.

I was impressed how fascinated the kids were, watching me stitch by hand. I realized this is the kind of thing I would probably be doing if I were around home all the time.

This morning it was like Christmas morning, when the kids discovered all three puppets were completed. And while I was content heading back to work but still had time to squeeze in an early morning puppet show!