101 ways to entertain a toddler when you can't leave the house

Balls of wool. Cans of squirty cream. A yoga ball. An Irish Bodhrán.
Emilia enjoys reading The Star as part of her weekend activitiesEmilia enjoys reading The Star as part of her weekend activities
Emilia enjoys reading The Star as part of her weekend activities

These objects may sound to you completely disparate, like they have nothing in common at all.

But anybody lucky enough to be parent to a small child in this past crazy year would disagree.

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No household object is untouched in the weekend battle to entertain our one-year-old when you can only leave the house once a day, recently in freezing temperatures that hardly encourage long walks. And we live in fear of having to self isolate and not even being able to do that!

The thought of going to a playgroup or swimming, followed by a hot drink in a warm place that is not home now sounds like the kind of hedonistic day out only enjoyed by 1970s rock stars.

There’s plenty of toys or books to start the day of course – but those and nursery rhymes will only get you so far.

Luckily dad is into music so we have plenty of drumming, guitar strumming and shaking maracas, not to mention dancing to everything from reggae to the BeeGees.

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I love to cook and Emilia likes to ‘help’, pouring eggs into peanut butter cookie mixture, stirring a wooden spoon in bowls and eating the specially coloured noodles that are definitely only meant to be thrown about.

We’ve bounced on the yoga ball and all the beds, played endless games of peekaboo, and I’ve spent so much time crawling around pretending to be a tiger there are holes in all my trouser knees.

She makes herself toilet roll goatees and ties knots in balls of wool, chases the cat and occasionally watches three minutes of Postman Pat. We’d love to know how one of the episodes actually ends...

Last weekend, when temperatures reached their lowest, things reached their most surreal.

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We dissected The Star, ‘painted’ the window with squirty cream, poked spaghetti through a colander and hid bath toys at the bottom of a tray full of purple jelly and let her search for them, all the time practicing whale noises.

It was one of those moments where you stop for a second and wonder at how life has changed. Roll on springtime and playing in the garden.