Hand-eye coordination

One of the areas of difficulty for Alastair remains his fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination, so I'm always looking for ways to help him improve. We've both become a bit fatigued with so many of these toys and activities which profess to advance your baby's skills in these areas. I can categorically state that we will never look at another form board puzzle again in our lives. 3 years we've been plugging away and we're still no further on, so they all went in a big bag last week and were happily donated to the charity shop.

And we've been playing with real toys ever since. I think my definition of a real toy is one where we all argue over whose turn it is.

My next bit of enlightened therapy was to admit that, after the toys that I also want to play with, there are jobs that I have to do and where he can help. His tendency is to refuse, though he didn't mind being exploited to plant the beans and make the pizza....

But looking at these photos makes me realise that the guy will certainly look if he needs to.

So I am more and more convinced that much of this 'play therapy' is a bit artificial and certainly not for us. From these pictures you'd think nothing was wrong.

But now when something isn't working, we will just stop doing it, rather than labour over it.

And only do stuff which interests and engages the both of us, in some way.

Sounds obvious again, doesn't it? Still I'd not quite figured this out before today.