Unplug your kids - balance

The theme for this week's Unplug your Kids project was balance.

I had originally wondered about making our own set of scales, like this. However, that project was a bit beyond Wombat, and I think I will save it until he is older. We do have a set of balance scales, and I may get them out for some (carefully supervised) experimenting sometime this week. He loves to put an object on our kitchen scales and tell me that it weighs 58 kgs!

But back to balancing... while digging hunting for worms in the garden, Wombat kept frustrating me by walking along the brick edge. Each time he did it, a loose brick would overturn, hurting his foot and as a result I spent more time comforting him and rebuilding the edge than I did weeding! Finally, I decided, if you can't beat him, join him!

I found 16 clean bricks and two (almost) straight planks of wood lying around the yard, and with a bit of improvisation, we built a balance beam. It is just high enough off the ground to be a little challenging, but not enough to cause injury should he fall. I actually find it quite enjoyable to do the exercise myself (disregarding MIL's comment about walking the plank lol). The slight warp in the beams makes it a little more tricky, but I propped a few pieces of soft bark under the highest contact points to minimize wobbling. Wombat is really into building obstacle courses lately (after I built one for him on a whim a few months ago) so we are going to leave this set up and see what other ideas we can think of to add to it.

Wombat also came up with his own balance experiment - eating grapes from a bowl "just like a pussycat"!

Next week's unplugged topic is "ball".