Episode: 2294
Title: HPR2294: Activities with a Toddler
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2294/hpr2294.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 00:57:52

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This is HPR episode 2,294 entitled,
Activities with a toddler and is part of the series,
Podcasting out or,
It is hosted by Shane Shenan and is about 11 minutes long
and Karina Cleanflag.
The summary is, 11 things you can do with a toddler you are taking care of.
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Hello there, hacker public radio listeners.
My name is Shane Shenan and it's been quite a while since I've done this.
But I've been here in the episodes
and I've been here in the episodes
and I've been here in the episodes
and I've been here in the episodes
and I've been here in the episodes
that ask listeners to record a podcast.
And I've got this blue snowball microphone
sitting on my desk staring at me
like a big eye
just to imagine that I record something.
So here we go.
What I'm going to do is tell you about the activities that I do with my toddler.
And this might give you activities to do with a toddler if
you're a parent or a grandparent
or a caregiver or babysitter.
So what I did is I opened up my note app.
I'm going to do an episode about color notes at some point.
But this is a great app and I've listed 11 things that I do with my kid.
Just a bit of background.
I'm 38 years old and I became a parent two years ago.
And my toddler keeps me pretty busy.
She's pretty active.
And the best I can hold for is keep her busy with one activity for about 15 minutes.
Most of the time, if you're lucky maybe 20 or 30 minutes.
But that's just gravy.
So this is a bunch of activities that you can switch too easily
from one activity to another.
Keep her busy, happy, and active and spend time with her.
So the first one I have here is listed in my note app as
milk and TV.
This is for when we wake up together on Saturday mornings or Sunday mornings.
I plop her in front of the TV and I watch my little pony or
veggie tails with her.
And she's invested in that for as long as she has milk in her bottle.
So I give her usually 8 ounces on a morning like that, maybe 9 ounces.
And she takes her time drinking it.
She watches the TV.
But after that she gets restless.
But it's just a good time to put on content that I want her to watch.
And time where she can just kind of wake up
before she decides what she wants to do for the rest of the morning.
So that's a good thing.
Yeah, the Lego brand blocks both for children.
She builds cars with them and towers.
And that's what all she can do right now.
But if you sit down on a floor with her and play with her show,
play with those for quite a long time.
And what's cool is to see her putting the blocks together,
and she's so proud of the things that she makes.
And because I was a big Lego kid when I was growing up,
it's just nice for me to see her playing with those kinds of toys.
If you engage with her, she'll also play with her dollhouse for a long time.
She's got all kinds of little figures, a mommy and a daddy and a baby and a frog
and a pig and all these different figures.
And she plays with them since we've been trying to potty trainer.
She puts them on the toilet in the dollhouse and makes farted noises,
which is amusing.
But we kind of use some of those things to role play situations like dinner time
or potty time, just so she's just to think of those things in a different way
with the toys in her hands.
This one's really cool. A meal preparation.
This toddler really wants to be part of things, so if you start making a meal,
she starts getting needy, but you can have her help you with it.
So sometimes I have her help throw the frozen vegetables into the walk
or I get her to put things that I'm cut into a bowl after I've cut them.
Anything just to have her involved in the meal preparation process.
And if you're doing something that she really can't partake in,
she really can't help out, then there's a fourth item here.
No, no, fifth item on my list.
This is really good. A mix and bowl.
Give her a mix and bowl and put something in it like sprinkles or
a bit of flour or things like that.
And give her a spoon and a couple other containers.
And she'll spend time spooning things from one container into another and mixing things
and she'll feel like part of the process, even though she's not actually helping repair the meal.
And that's helped prepare her for helping her mom bake and cook later on.
The last pie we had, this Easter,
my toddler helped make it.
And I think some of the skills that she learned from helping me
helped it with that.
Next we have craft or painting.
Great for the kitchen table.
She has several boxes full of things like sparkles and sparkly paint and stickers
and there's lots of paper around.
And she can put the stickers on the paper
and we can help her with glue and stuff like that.
And she loves that. She gets so excited when we tell her it's going to be craft time.
And also painting is in the same vein.
I get one of those dishes for kids that has three or four different sections in it
and that put painting each section.
And that makes the paint so
just realize the paints are different colors that way.
Sink time. This used to be one of her favorites.
You put a chair in front of the sink
with the back
facing away from the sink
and then you put her up on the chair.
So she won't fall backwards while she's playing in the sink.
But you fill the sink up quite full with warm water
and then you give her a bunch of things like
her kitty bowl and her kitty.
I realize that it sounds like kitty but I'm saying
kid or kitty.
Although I do mix it up with my cat and my kid all the time.
And then you'll play with those for a while.
If you have no Tim Horton's cup or just any other containers
we'll spend a lot of time pouring water from one place into another.
You have to have a towel or something handy
because you will spill. And you'll have to
you know be right there to make sure that her
her chair is not wet so she won't slip.
I want to make sure that there's not too much water running on to the floor.
Although at that point in the day
you might be doing anything to keep her detained so you might not care about a lot of water.
We're getting near to the end of the list here.
Looks like I've got four more items. Chasing and tickling.
I really feel like I connect with her most when I'm chasing her around.
Laughing and running around.
And she likes me in tickles.
She has this great belly laugh when she's being tickled.
And then I know I'm really connecting with her and doing something that's fun for her.
It's weird for me because I never like tickling. I still don't do this day.
But she seems to get a kick out of it so chasing her around.
Tickling her, lifting her up, flying her around.
Things like that. That's a good connecting activity.
And now she's getting to the age for this third last item,
reading. Sometimes she'll take a book by herself and just
sit by herself and make some sounds as if she's reading a book like we do.
But sometimes she'll bring a book to us and ask us to read to her.
Which is great. My wife and I are big readers so it's
starting to pass that on to her. She'll usually read
want to read or want us to read two or three books at a time.
That's about all she's a capable of sitting still
for right now.
This second last one, this came in handy last week.
We took something away from her and she was crying a lot.
So I took her into the backyard and just cuddled her for a bit.
I stopped crying when I took off my phone and we watched cat videos on YouTube.
We have a cat and she's fascinated by her cat toys.
And she likes hearing the sound of kittens and cats mowing and yelling and things on YouTube.
So you'll find a lot of YouTube videos that are between three and six minutes long.
Which is good for a toddler time span I think.
The attention span.
And this last one might be just for my kid but it might be for all toddlers.
I don't know.
My toddler likes containers of things.
So for example, if you give her a box of crayons,
the first thing she'll think of is not playing with the crayons by coloring but by
taking them out of the box and then putting them back in the box.
So if I want to keep her busy for a while
entertained, what I'll do I'll give her a box or a bag
like a paper gift bag and put some things in it.
And then she'll spend a lot of time carrying things around even if you just have some wooden blocks
and put a dozen of them into a bag.
She'll spend a lot of time organizing them, taking them out, putting them on a table,
putting them back in the bag, that kind of thing.
So that's my roundup of the things that I put in my no-dap.
When I'm at the end of my rope I take a look.
I pick an item from the list and there we go, spend some quality time with her
doing those things.
I hope this gives you ideas for if you're taking care of a toddler
and good luck to you.
And I'll talk to you guys later.
I intend to record more of these.
Goodbye.
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