Teatime: Spiritual Emergence Kit

Teafaerie shares her favorite trip toys from her bag of tricks.

I had a job as a hotel nanny in Hawaii for a while. It was awesome. I was Maui Poppins. My company worked all of the big resorts. Mostly it was an evening gig, where I had to hang out with tiny strangers in a hotel room for a few hours while mom and dad went to dinner and a show. The problem with hotel rooms is there’s not much to do in there besides bounce on the bed and watch TV. Now I’ve got no objection to gymnastics practice, but I feel like a failure when my charges are compelled to resort to passive entertainment. So after a few weeks of making up games like "let’s put dozens of strips of toilet paper up on the fan and then turn it on and see how many we can catch in the air", I started bringing a bag of tricks and toys along with me on my visitations. The contents got use-tested and refined over time, and eventually I got it down to a tight collection of classic hits.