A so-called living room family

We're a so-called living room family. Play and snacks happen everywhere, drinks too, but I do need to manage that as best I can.

Protecting the sofa from kids, the honest version

Our sofa got ruined in the first two years of having kids. They played on it and they ate on it, and back then there was nothing between them and the cushions.

So I bought a textile cleaning machine. It worked wonders for a reset. But I don't get around to it enough, so now the mat is the first line of defence.

The Roam Round had spent the baby years under the highchair. Moving it to the sofa was a natural instinct. They were on the sofa all the time anyway, so the mat went where they were.

An ordinary afternoon

After school it looks like this. An audiobook on. Drawing tablets out, Lego tipped onto the mat, a drink beside it, and a plate of snacks in the middle.

The snacks are partly a waste thing. I unpack whatever is left in the Znüni boxes (the mid-morning snack they take to school) and put it on a plate on the sofa. Nothing goes in the bin, and they're hungry when they get in anyway.

It's not only school days. In the holidays the sofa is the spot for the audiobook, the markers and a bowl of banana with peanut butter. When friends come round for a movie, the pizza goes on the mat too.

What changed most was me

Before, there was an underlying anxiety in the room. I hovered. I said "be careful" a lot, and "mind the sofa", and every one of those reminders interrupts their flow. They're deep in a drawing or halfway through a Lego build, and there I am pulling them out of it to talk about a cushion.

Without that, it's easier for everyone. They hang around, get bored, wander off and come back, and I leave them to it.

Freedom, with guardrails

I enjoy being able to give them the freedom. I'd rather allow things with guardrails than ban everything. It's my ethos: give freedom where I can, and responsibility alongside it.

The mat is a guardrail. It means I can say yes to the snack plate and the markers without the yes costing me a sofa.

At bedtime it gets a wipe and goes over the airer. The sofa is mine again for the evening.

If your family lives in the living room too, the mat on our sofa is the Roam Round, 105 cm across.