Playing Hide and Seek With a Distracted Child

Have you ever played Hide and Seek with a distracted child? For practically my entire life I have played this game with my own children, my grandchildren, and the hundred or so other kids who have been in my care over the years. I tend to forget from time to time, however, that little 3-year-olds sometimes get distracted.

Yesterday my 3-year-old granddaughter, Avery, and I were playing, and I had to remind her not to call out my name when she was the seeker. She tends to panic when she can’t find me immediately and I have to assure her that I’m not leaving the house.

I found a spot that usually isn’t in my bedroom. I was washing my sheets and I had placed the comforter and blanket on the floor at the foot of the bed. I hurriedly hid under the blankets until she finished counting to 20 (though she must have an aversion to the number 15, which she sometimes skips). 

After she finished counting, I heard her shuffling around in the living room and I waited. And I waited. And I waited some more. Finally, after what seemed an inordinately long period of time, I called out, “Avery, did you forget we were playing Hide and Seek?”

“Oh, yeah,” she laughed. For some reason, though I’ve had the shelf of bins in my living room since shortly after I moved in last Fall, she became curious about what was inside those bins and was going through them while I suffocated under the blankets on the floor of my bedroom.

Afterword – Avery is usually very focused and very conscientious, as you can see in this video. I was cleaning up the kitchen after lunch and she was putting away the “castle house” we made before lunch so we could enjoy “quiet time,” the time after lunch when we watch a movie together. She makes up her own songs and sings them while she’s cleaning up. For some reason, though my son is named Greg and he is Avery’s uncle, we weren’t talking about him or doing anything Gregory-related. Still she came up with what I'm calling, The Gregory Song: