Julie's Boggle

PlayCafé is a play group that has been run by our church, St Simon’s, for several years now.  The church owns a great set of toys and the group enjoys a fair amount of popularity amongst the neighbourhood mums and nannies.  Needless to say, it’s an activity that I gravitated towards quite readily after Jon was born.

I started going in September last year (Jon was 3 months old) and didn’t contribute much for a while. Part of the PlayCafé ethos is good coffee and home-made munchies, and in those early months I was a very appreciative consumer – enjoying the way that breast-feeding seems to let one eat boundlessly.

Later on I began attending the organisational / prayer meetings and spotted some areas on the rota where I could assist, namely “set-up” and “cake-making”. Thus began a fairly enjoyable (ongoing) season of exercising my out-of-practice baking skills, and taking Jon along to the church every couple of weeks to play with some toys while we rearrange the chairs and set up the play areas.

PlayCafé runs once a week during term-time and there’s usually a queue forming when the doors open at 09h30!  The sessions are fairly basic: The first hour is set aside for general playtime or making that week’s craft item at the craft table, and hopefully the adults get some time off for refreshments and chat during this period.

Then follows about twenty minutes of group singing and a short bible-related story after which we officially end.  The tidy-up time that follows takes another 30 – 45 minutes.

We have a lovely little team of volunteers on the rota, and are often assisted in clearing up by the people who come along.

I’ve enjoyed watching how Jon has moved through various stages at PlayCafé. He started off on the baby mats where he used to spend the sessions lying under a playgym with a few toys around him, just happy to watch the goings-on.

That was followed by a long period of sitting up and getting more interested in the other babies (and what they were playing with ), and then came the rolling, wriggling and leopard-crawling that meant he was seldom on the mats for any extended length of time.

The adjacent toddler area with its crates of lego and stickle-bricks was his next stop, but once he was crawling properly, that was the end of him staying anywhere for longer than about 10 minutes.

Once Jon became fully mobile, I could really appreciate how wonderful a resource like a play group is for kids.  Jon roves all over with scarcely a care for where I am.  He bounces on the trampoline, rides the push-cars (if someone helps him onto one), opens and closes doors and windows in the wendy house, tinkers with the wooden units in the “kitchen” area and, above all, is ever vigilant for careless little people dropping pieces of cake or biscuit!

While PlayCafé has been fun for Jon, and for me socialising with others in the child-minding boat, I’ve also enjoyed being part of something that is run entirely on a non-commercial basis.  There is no charge at the door, and no charge for the refreshments.  It’s all beautifully free and available to any one who wants to make use of it.

Somehow, in our society, we’ve evolved to the point where this has become a very precious thing…