Playing Alone

I just finished reading an article "Teaching Your Children To Play Alone." It was full of ways for a parent to induce children to do something by themselves so the parent could have some "alone time".
I wonder if that is the same thing Mom was doing when she used to say, "Go outside and run around the house and let the stink blow off."
I don't think her problem was getting us to play by ourselves; I think it was getting us to help her with the work.
The article listed ideas for different ages. Of course we didn't have a lot of toys when I was a kid. One of the things I remember doing at a young age was stringing empty thread spools on a shoe string. That was when thread came on wooden spools. Another variation when we were a little older was stringing buttons. Mom or one of the grandmas would give us her button jar and a threaded needle. We would string buttons until the jar was empty - sometimes unstringing them and starting over.
Playing dress up was another fun activity. I have Mom's picture of Betty and me and our four Roberts cousins all dressed up. Aunt Evelyn must have taken a picture of us too because Glenna asked me not long ago where my Mom got all the hats, as Mom wasn't much of a hat wearer.
I remember using our allowance at the dime store to buy paper umbrellas, paper fans and birthstone rings. I think the fans were five cents and the umbrellas and rings were ten cents each. Of course the paper accessories soon got torn and the rings got lost, but they added to the dressing up.
Do kids still make mud pies? Betty and I could spend hours baking our mud pies and decorating them with leaves or flowers. Coffee can lids made good pans because they were shallow and the pies baked fast. We also used jar lids for smaller, but deeper pies. Hay making time was a good time to make mud pies. The dirt in the barnyard was as fine as sifted flour where the hay sledges were pulled up under the hay mow for unloading.
Even though I had a little sister and sometimes an older brother to play with, there were still times when I strayed off into my own little world. It might be out to the barn to play with the kittens or just putzing around the farm making up stories in my mind. And maybe that was the key to learning to play alone - we were allowed to.