Keep the Crew Happy and Quiet in a Tiny Room

Keeping three kids happy while waiting at the doctors office is a difficult task. Usually we get through the waiting room without a problem... the kids can rearrange the chairs, roll around on the floor, take magazines off of the shelf and occasionally sit quietly in my lap and read a book. It's that tiny examination room that presents the problem. I know they keep the place clean but the bottom line is that doctors offices are where sick people go and I would rather we keep our germs to ourselves. To accomplish that I let the kids pick toys (or costumes) from home to bring and play with while we wait. Typically we bring matchbox cars, magna doodles, or some other SMALL item they can play with QUIETLY while keeping their hands occupied. Once our pediatrician comes in I bring out stickers and crayons to entertain the kids who are not actually there to see the doctor. Notice I didn't say stickers, crayons and paper. Each doctors office comes will a large sheet of germ free paper on the examination table, right off the roll. They think its a TON of fun to stick stickers all over that sheet. It gives the kids a big surface to write and play on and the staff doesn't care because they just rip the sheet off and throw it away after we leave anyway. Sometimes we've even drawn roads on the paper for the matchbox cards to drive on. This typically works well for me and it keeps them playing on the paper. However, even with the costume and my bag of tricks, our well visit this week was QUITE EVENTFUL. If you have a minute to read about that circus like experience, click here. I think you'll find it worth the read.

To find out what works for other people, visit Rocks in My Dryer.