Photo A Day: Play

“Play” is a word with many meanings. It can be a noun or a verb. As a noun, it can mean a dramatic stage performance (“We enjoyed seeing the play”), a dramatic composition (“a Shakespeare play”), an activity for amusement or recreation (“children at play”), the action or conduct of a game (“the catcher made an excellent play”), or a pun (“a play on words”). As a verb, it can mean a dramatic portrayal (“I play Lady Macbeth”), to act a part on stage or in real life (“I play the part of benefactor”), to perform in a city as a theatrical company (“Next week we play Peoria”), to engage in (“play ball”), to contend against (“the Celtics play the Knicks”), to so something in sport or in jest (“I’m just playing with you”), or to conduct oneself in a certain way (“to play fair”).

When it comes to children, the word “play” applies in many of these ways. Children play games, they role-play, they put on plays, they play instruments, they jest, they make puns, they vie against each other, they play music. For children, most of life is “play” in some form or another.

This morning, both of my children had a chance to “play” at church: they sang as part of their respective choirs, which included music being played by both a piano and a guitar, and also playing with their friends.

But the most important definition of “play” that was in play (ahem) this morning, was “an activity for amusement and recreation.” They were HAVING FUN. You can see by my daughter’s smile in this photo that she was having a wonderful time. They were learning, they were thinking, they were engaged, they were with friends, they were PLAYING.

Play.

You Gotta Play the Game

Every once in a while, I’ll do something with my kids, or with my whole family, that reminds me of something I did with my parents when I was a kid. It might be camping, or cooking, or going apple picking, or reading a story out loud. Last night, it was playing board games.

I grew up in a household where we played games ALL THE TIME. We’d sit in front of the fireplace in the evening and play Life or Sorry or Trouble, we’d sit around the dining room table and play Uno or spoons, we’d sit inside our camper and play cribbage or backgammon by the light of the lantern. We’d even play all kinds of games in the car: finding the letters of the alphabet in order on signs, checking off license plates from all 50 states, a game called “Wordy Gurdy” where all the answers have to rhyme (What do you call counterfeit dollar bills? Funny money!), sometimes we’d bring along a Mad Libs pad. We had a stack of board games on the shelf in the closet, another stack behind the couch, a whole drawer full of decks of cards and books with rules for hundreds of card games, and a bag of travel-sized games in the coat closet. 

When we were small, we played Chutes and Ladders, Candyland, checkers, Old Maid, Don’t Break the Ice, War, and Operation. When we were a bit older, we played Boggle, Clue, Monopoly, Milles Bornes, Waterworks, Probe, dominos, and Yahtzee. When we had friends over, or at birthday parties, we played Twister, Pictionary, Taboo, and Scattergories. When it was just my sister and I, we’d play 2-person games like Battleship and Chinese Checkers and Simon and double solitaire and Mastermind.

I didn’t realize at the time how many skills I was learning by playing these games. Candyland and Sorry taught me colors and how to count. Chutes and Ladders taught me not to be disappointed by a setback. Operation and Don’t Break the Ice taught me fine motor skills. Boggle and Probe taught me spelling and vocabulary. Cribbage taught me math. Checkers and Battleship and Risk taught me strategy. Clue taught me logic. Monopoly taught me patience (and, with my sister’s help, how to make change). Pictionary and Taboo taught me to think creatively.

So now, when my kids ask to play a game, I look forward to not just having fun with them, but to the opportunity to teach them new skills. I can teach them to be good sports (and most especially, good losers), I can teach them that math and spelling can be fun, I can teach them to be patient and polite, I can teach them to be fair, I can teach them to think through their decisions and their actions, I can teach them that sometimes life isn’t fair. And most importantly, I can teach them that spending time together with friends and family is a good thing. A very good thing. 

Sometimes You've Just Gotta Break the Rules

I would describe myself as someone who’s generally a rule-follower. Someone who obeys rules merely because they ARE rules. Someone who does what’s expected, what’s “normal,” what’s “right.” But every now and then, I just need to break the rules.

So today, when I picked up my son at lunchtime and he and my daughter begged to play on the big bell outside the school, I let them. I paid no attention to my arbitrary schedule that said we needed to be home by 12:05pm and eating our healthy, nutritionally-balanced lunch by 12:23pm and attempting to get my daughter to take a nap by 1:03pm. Instead, we hung around for nearly an hour, just kicking snowbanks. We banged on the big brass bell until it gave deep, sympathetic, shivering chimes. We chased each other down the sidewalk and played tetherball with the balloons on the signboard and took turns being the King of the Mountain on the big piles of snow still in the yard. We listened to the big carillon in the church steeple playing hymns. We spotted a fat robin hopping across the grass in search of worms. We waved at passing trucks.

And when we got tired of that, we decided it would be a good day to have ice cream for lunch. Not WITH lunch, not AFTER lunch, but FOR lunch. And not just ice cream, but ice cream sundaes, complete with hot fudge and rainbow sprinkles and mini M&Ms and gummy worms. 

  

A certain young man was quite proud to sit all by himself at the counter, politely wiping up his own spills (of which there were impressively few) and running over to throw his dirty napkins in the trash, while a certain young lady was content to let Mom share her treat, and who politely informed the older couple who inquired about the deliciousness of her ice cream, “Dat my brudder Ryan. Dat my mom. I Katie,” much to their delight.

And when we got home, instead of following my instinct to get them inside and cleaned up, I let them play in the snow and the puddles and the mud. (I did make my daughter take off her brand-new sneakers and put on her old, almost-outgrown ones instead.) My son spent an hour chipping little bits of ice and snow with his shovel and relocating them, pausing to watch a squirrel race up a tree or to pull a broken stick free from a snowbank. My daughter, at first clutching her stuffed monkeys, tentatively poked a toe at the mud just beyond the brick walkway, but eventually embraced the sloppiness so much that she actually lost a shoe in the mud. She patted puddles with her hand and then one foot and then jumped in with both feet, making a huge, muddy splash. She took charge of her brother’s shovel and dug both snow and mud indiscriminately. Her monkey pals were abandoned to play in puddles on their own (they were rewarded for their troubles with an exciting ride in the washing machine later in the day). 

And what was the price I paid for breaking the rules a little? There are 2 more pairs of pants and 4 more socks in the laundry than there would have otherwise been, there are a few muddy footprints in the hallway, there are a couple of pairs of shoes that will need to be scrubbed a bit, and there’s a full dishwasher that probably should have been run through before dinnertime. But the rewards of an afternoon of fresh air, two happy, laughing children, and several hours of not thinking about a schedule or a list of chores? Those rewards are far, far beyond price.

The Best of Intentions

When it comes to doing cool projects with my kids, I always have the best of intentions but it doesn’t always work out the way I’ve hoped. Sometimes I come up with great ideas but when we do them, they either fizzle or the kids aren’t interested even if they seem cool to me. Sometimes I come up with great ideas but don’t ever get around to actually doing them, whether it’s because I don’t have the supplies on hand, or because I can’t catch the kids in the right mood, or because I can’t catch myself in the right mood. And sometimes, I just draw a blank.

Great ideas that kind of fizzled have included my infamous crayon-melting experiment (progress was too slow for short attention spans, not to mention that the final result was not nearly as spectacular as it was promised to be), making homemade Play-Doh (they didn’t want to help mix in the color because the dough was too hot), and snow painting with food coloring (the snow kept sticking to the paint brush).

Great ideas that I never quite got around to executing include freezing colored water in water balloons to decorate the front walk (the water balloons I got were too small and I haven’t gotten to the store to get better ones), making sugar-on-snow with real maple syrup (I keep forgetting to look for directions on line), and making glowing glitter jars from glow sticks (I have some glow sticks and glitter but believe it or not I don’t have a single clear jar with a tight-fitting lid anywhere in the house).

And as for drawing a blank, today I’m snowed inside the house with two small children (and a husband working from home who’d prefer I keep the children reasonably quiet and, if possible, in the kitchen and out of the playroom adjacent to the office) and essentially zero ideas. I’ve been scrolling through Pinterest, checking out projects in back issues of High Five magazine (remember those Highlights you used to read at the dentist’s office? This is the preschool version), and just generally staring out the window hoping for inspiration to strike. So far, inspiration consists of decorating sugar cookies (I have some premade dough in the fridge), making English muffin pizzas, and…well, that’s it, actually.

Fortunately, my kids are self-sufficient enough that they’ll come up with some ideas of their own. My best of intentions are likely to be trumped by my son’s suggestions of playing “Battle” or “Sword Explosion Robot War” or “Monster Truck Wrestling Ball” (rules of these games are created spontaneously and subject to change without notice), and by my daughter’s suggestions of…well, come to think of it, running in circles shrieking at the top of our lungs is pretty much her only suggestion.

Wait! I think I’ve just been struck with inspiration!!! I’ll just let my kids play whatever they want while I sit back with a cup of coffee and enjoy letting them just be kids. Yeah, that’s a pretty good intention. And I bet I’ll have no problems following through on that one. 

Attractive Nuisances

Under the law, an “attractive nuisance” is defined as “anything on your premises that might attract children into danger or harm.” Common examples of attractive nuisances include swimming pools, ponds, trampolines, and tree houses. But based on my personal experience, most homes are chock-full of attractive nuisances, inside and out.

My children, like most, apparently have radar which helps them find every attractive nuisance within reach (as well as many that are not). Whenever they enter an unfamiliar room, they instinctively make a beeline to the nearest electrical outlet, knife block, or breakable objet d’art in sight. In a familiar room, they know all the best trouble they can get into and they find it as soon as they can. If my kids are in the office and I leave the room for 30 seconds, when I come back my daughter is invariably playing with a letter-opener shaped like a sword and my husband’s checkbook. (The checkbook may not seem like a harmful object, but believe me, if she scribbles on or rips up the last check, her life will be in danger.) If they’re in the playroom and I leave to answer the phone, when I return I’m sure to find one or the other of them attempting to climb up the entertainment center containing hundreds of pounds of books and a large-screen television. In the kitchen, I don’t even need to leave the room, but just turn my back for a second, and two little hands are reaching for the burner knobs on the stove or stretching toward the delicate wine glasses on the sideboard.

Life itself, for a small child, is an attractive nuisance.

After all, to them, everything is attractive. Everything is new, and interesting, and curiosity-inspiring. Unlike me, they don’t know everything that’s in the junk drawer, nor what it is, nor what it’s for. So of course they want to dig and explore and examine. They’re too short to see what’s at the back of the counter, or on top of the fridge, or on a high shelf in the bathroom closet. So they try to climb up there and take a peek using whatever method they can find, be it stacking up toys or boxes, or scaling lower shelves, or swinging like a monkey from a nearby piece of furniture.

And unfortunately, to them, many things are also dangerous. A stove, when you know how to use it and you use it properly, is not dangerous. Nor is a sharp knife, nor a pair of scissors, nor an electrical outlet. These are all extremely useful, practical, even necessary items for modern life. But in the hands of a small, ignorant, curious child, all these things change from necessities to nuisances. 

Katie discovering the principles of elasticity via an attractive nuisance commonly called a bungee cord.

Ryan can even make paint an attractive nuisance, especially since it’s kept on top of the refrigerator.

Hopefully, they will outgrow their ignorance before they outgrow their curiosity, and hopefully before long the attractive nuisances will become attractive learning experiences. But until then, I guess I’ll just have to learn how to manage a couple of attractive nuisances of my own.

Boys vs. Girls, Part ???

Objects my son has used as a gun in the past week:

·        Legos

·        Stuffed animals

·        A stick

·        A wooden spoon

·        A fork

·        A camera

·        Matchbox cars

·        Toy fire engines

·        Playing cards

·        Lego guys

·        Crayons

Objects my daughter has either kissed or talked to in the past week:

·        Legos

·        Stuffed animals

·        A stick

·        A wooden spoon

·        A fork

·        A camera

·        Matchbox cars

·        Toy fire engines

·        Playing cards

·        Lego guys

·        Crayons

 Maybe my children aren’t typical. But given the same exact toys, they play with them very differently. Sit them on the floor and drop a laundry basket on top of their heads and my son will either announce that he’s a bad guy in jail or roar like a lion, while my daughter will merely giggle and announce, “Peekaboo!” Give them a doll in one hand and a truck in the other and my daughter will carefully wedge the doll into the driver’s seat of the truck (after carefully kissing them both and then making them kiss each other, of course), while my son will run the doll over with the truck.

 There are times when they’ll play together with the same toys. They’ll each choose a racecar and make vroom-vroom noises together. They’ll each pick a stuffed animal and march around the room making the appropriate animal noises at each other. They’ll sit in front of the Elmo’s Potty Time video giggling together at the Dirty Diaper Blues song and clapping when Elmo rides his tricycle. They’ll take turns kicking and rolling a ball back and forth. They’ll alternate between hugging each other and chasing each other around the room at top speed while screaming at the top of their lungs.

If they can be so completely different and yet still be so devoted to each other, it gives me hope for the rest of the world.

The Games People Play

My son loves games. He loves active games like Hide and Seek, Catch, and Simon Says. He loves board games like Candyland and Chutes and Ladders. He loves brain games like I Spy and What Shapes Do You See. But the games he loves best of all are the ones he makes up himself.

The first game he ever made up was something he calls “Bing, Bang, Boom.” This is a game played by two people using two large balls. The players each hold a ball and sit about 6 feet apart, then chant, “Bing…bang…BOOM!” and on the word “BOOM” they roll the balls toward each other and try to crash them together. When they crash, both players laugh uproariously, chase the balls, and do it all over again.

Another recent favorite is “Soccer Falling.” Another two-player game, this one requires only one ball. The players stand facing each other a few feet apart, and one player kicks the ball to the other. Instead of kicking it back, the receiving player immediately falls over. Cue uproarious laughter. My daughter helped create a 3-player variation of this game where the third player randomly wanders in between the other two and either kicks the ball back to the first player (usually by accident) or gets hit by the ball and falls over. This variation is somewhat less popular because it occasionally ends in tears instead of uproarious laughter.

He’s also created a whole series of dancing games that can be played by any number of players, from one person right on up to however many can fit in the room. These games generally have names like, “Penguin Dance,” “Robot Dance,” and “Silly Chicken Dance,” even though there’s no resemblance to a penguin, a robot, or a silly chicken that I can see. I’m not even really clear on what the difference between these games is, as they all seem to involve madly stomping, flailing, wriggling, shimmying, twirling, and spinning around on the floor like a manic break-dancer. But that fact doesn’t bother him in the least.

Explaining one of his games to cousins John and Catherine.

 

I love that these games are further proof that he can find ways to entertain himself. I love that he understands the concept that games have rules, even if he often changes them. I love that he’s occasionally willing to let his little sister join in his games. I love that he uses his body creatively. I love that he totally cracks himself up when he plays them. And I love how completely uninhibited and unselfconscious he is whenever he plays any of them.

But most of all, I love how uninhibited and unselfconscious I am when I play those games with him. Anyone want to join me for a few rounds of “Silly Chicken Dance”?