Milne: This album along with the follow-up The House at Pooh Corner are our favourite. What really worked for us was beginning with stories that were driven by their accompanying music. These are shorter stories and were perfect for when we were still trying to coax a nap out of our children but they needed some help falling asleep. I expect all of the titles I’m about to mention can be downloaded or streamed from a number of different places.Įarly Days: When the kids were really young, they could listen to the same story over and over. Eventually I got a membership to Audible and I simply use my monthly credit to add to our library. Initially my wife purchased books on CD or borrowed them from the library. While we have listened to a lot of books over the years, I thought I’d share the ones that got us started and a few of my personal favourites. This has been a huge help in our constant struggle to limit their screen time. Somehow a suggested activity is met with a firm “no” on its own, but if paired with a “story” it is accepted. I was seriously considering writing an entire article as an ode to Winnie the Pooh, as it gets replayed constantly. Both my kids will often replay old stories while they work on Lego or crafts or when they are sick at home. Sometimes we’ll start a book on vacation and finish the book at bedtimes when we get home. What began as a strategy to make car rides bearable has now become a large part of our day to day. “This has been a huge help in our constant struggle to limit their screen time.” The only downside (if it has to be called a downside), is that I can’t even back out of the driveway without one of the kids already asking, “can we turn on the stories?” Our new rule is the story starts once we get on the highway. This has allowed for some really fun adventures where the journey is often as much fun as the destination. More importantly my kids don’t complain about having to take long drives and we have been able to turn them into shared family story time. Thankfully, she did and we have managed to keep our car almost entirely screen free as a result. We had decided early on that watching something on a tablet or phone would not be an option (we have since broken that rule for particularly long drives or as a special movie night replacement.) I am sure that if my wife had not picked up a few audiobooks on CD at that very moment, we probably would have ended up relying on some form of screened entertainment to preserve my sanity. To my utter horror, I even found myself threatening to “turn the car around” on more than a few occasions. Our quiet and peaceful drives became two hours of complaints, shouting, poking, yelling and general mayhem. “What began as a strategy to make car rides bearable has now become a large part of our day to day.”īut sadly, all good things must come to an end and what seemed rather abrupt, our children decided to stop napping in the car. I used to jokingly call them our “State of the Union” conversations. We just scheduled the drives around their naptimes and my wife and I could finally have some time to just talk. When our kids were really young, these drives were awesome. Less frequently, we drive from Montréal to New Brunswick to visit mine and most of our family vacations are spent car camping everywhere in between. For every major holiday, birthdays and random gatherings, we travel to Ottawa from Montréal to visit my wife’s family. Our family spends a lot of time in the car. How audiobooks saved our family road trips.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |