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.