What you can do when you stink at playing.

My name is Kara, and I stink at playing.

For more than 10 years, this fact has haunted me. It’s the one piece of advice my aunt, who has like 39 kids, gave me:

“Just get on the floor and play with them,” she said.

And I tried. For years I really tried to enjoy playing, but I was never good at it.

And I always felt kind of distracted. Kind of antsy. Kind of like I just couldn’t figure it out.

What does a water buffalo say to a snowshoe hare? (That’s not a joke — that was like, my life.)

I built block towers. I raced cars across the floor.

I ate a lot of pretend food. I put a lot of shoes on dolls.

Later, when my kids fell in love with LEGOs, I tried to assemble kits, but everyone in the house will tell you that “Mom is bad at diagrams.”

Example: In my adult life, I have put together the following things — a patio table, an Ikea table and a barbecue grill.

The patio table shattered last year and the handle on the grill faces the wrong way.

Our rolling Ikea table is fine, but it’s just a matter of time.

When faced with a bag of LEGOs, I feel like I’ve been tasked to put someone’s guts back in the right way.

For years, I felt like my inability to just “get on the floor and play,” made me a crummy mom. Not only was I bad at it, but I didn’t enjoy it, and good moms are supposed to enjoy that stuff, right?

My kids are 9 and almost 12 now. They are big. They still hand me doll shoes and LEGOs sometimes, but don’t need as much help.

And surprisingly, they are fine. They don’t hate me for being bad at playing. And what I’m starting to see is that the stuff we did instead was important too. We’ve formed bonds over a lot of it, and my kids now have some mad skills that took me until my 20s and 30s to develop.

So what did we do when we weren’t playing?

We cooked.

I have a clear memory of my son helping me cook on what was his second Thanksgiving. He would have been 21 months old. He’d been cooking with me for a while by that point. We had one of these and as he stood at the counter, rearranging our fruit basket, my mom remarked that he had been engaged in that task longer than she had seen him be engaged in anything all day.

He was washing vegetables and cutting soft foods like bananas by 2. That Christmas we asked for some Montessori style tools for him and I was amazed what he could do at 2 — mash potatoes, rinse foods, cut out cookies.

Sometimes it was messier, or took a little longer, but I think it paid off.

I have kids who love to cook and love to eat.

We did projects.

We made a lot of stuff when my kids were little.

These became known in our house as “projects.” We would glue felt to other felt, play with clay, bead things, make things — later, they both learned to knit and sew.

At least once a week we would create something together — little boats made of walnut shells and beeswax, stuff for every holiday — wet-felted hearts and Christmas ornaments.

We grew stuff and hatched things.

We painted T-shirts with animals on them.

We made placemats and pillows and stuff for our house.

We did a lot of art.

I read this book when my kids were little, and I fell in love with Amanda’s philosophy to make the good stuff available to my kids. I was a bit of an art nerd growing up, so I had some good stuff, and we invested slowly in more.

When relatives asked what they could get for a birthday or holiday, I would mention a nice set of markers, some watercolor paints, beeswax crayons. We bought fabric and buttons and yarn.

We made making a central part of our days — stuff was always available, and surprisingly I only remember one time ever when one of my kids wrote on the wall with fancy markers.

That room needed painting anyway. 😉

We read books.

Oh so many books. Books again and again. I can still recite all the words to this book and this one and this one.

I remember my son’s sweet voice, singing, “chicken soup wif wiiice.”

We read books until their covers fell off. We would laugh in bed over books like this one.

We went to the library every week.

Speaking of which, we went places.

The library every Friday. Sometimes it worked to do storytime, and sometimes, we just went and picked up bags of books.

We went to parks and the science museum, and we went on nature hikes and we saw friends and we had big and small adventures.

We wrote stories.

All those books got my kids interested in writing early. My son wrote sequels to some of his favorite books like this one.

At first, we would staple copy paper together, then we started buying blank books for the kids.

Eventually, my son asked for a typewriter, and then the kids transfered to the computer.

They can both type pretty well now. They love writing.

We played games.

When my daughter was born, my son was almost 3. And so every day during her afternoon nap, we would play a game together. We played a lot of Hi Ho Cherry O and Candyland and Chutes and Ladders.

When the kids got a little bigger, the three of us played cooperative games a lot.

We went through a very long Monopoly phase.

We currently love Blink and Blokus and Apples to Apples. < — I mean, I actually really like those games. Those are the ones I will play anytime. Other games live tucked away in a cabinet and get cycled in and out.

We followed the kids’ passions.

Like birds. We went to bird sanctuaries and made birdfeeders and counted birds and read bird books and learned bird calls and generally made birds really important in our home for like a year. Maybe more.

I set up fun stuff.

I created rice boxes and set out little surprises for them to find in the morning. I cycled toys in and out, so I could pull out something new and exciting once in a while.

We (gasp) watched TV.

I know. But we tried to not do it a lot. But Wonderpets is funny, and George is lovable. So we watched some shows sometimes, especially in the winter, or between 5:30-6:30 p.m. when we were waiting for Dad to get home and I had run out of chocolate.

We played anyway.

Even though I was terrible at it. Even when I thought I was doing it wrong.

Sometimes, I found myself doing it in an unconventional way, like when we set up all our play animals in an American Idol-inspired contest, and the chimp was really judgy and the collie liked everything.

I gave my daughter’s doll Max a very deep voice.

I would tell myself to play for 10 minutes, and then usually it turned into more.

But I still felt bad that I wasn’t just naturally good at it.

I don’t feel quite as bad now, though.

Because I see that sharing things I loved with my kids was wonderful.

I was bad at one thing, but I was pretty good at some others, which made our days really nice, actually.

I wish I could go back and whisper in my younger, firmer, less wrinkly ear:

Focus on the stuff you enjoy doing with them. You’re doing OK. They are going to become amazing kids.

They have.

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