Before I had kids, I loved playing. At age 30, I owned a wide array of board games as well as a vast nerdly display of toys -- an X-Files Scully Barbie and Mulder Ken, Star Wars action figures, a poseable Godzilla and several favorite stuffed animals. I played regularly with my friends, and I was fully intending to have a rip roaring good time playing with my kids.Then the real kids actually showed up. And not only are my kids not like the kids you see on TV, they're not like the clearly distorted memories I have of myself as a child. (I'm pretty sure I used to be a dream to play with.)
My children and I don't play well together. I've been banned from playing Star Wars with Janie because I "don't do the voices right." I can't play dinosaurs because I am not allowed to roar, and I get bored making the T-Rex play "Duck, Duck, Goose" without eating anyone. I'm not allowed to win at board games, if I get close, Austen changes the rules or reshuffles the cards or rolls the dice until they come up right. I'm regarded as nothing more than slave labor when it comes to Legos; I'm just a pair of dexterous hands that can carry out building plans. My creativity is frowned upon in all arenas. I strongly suspect that my children would prefer some animatronic likeness of me: a mom-like robot who would sit and watch them endlessly until called upon to make funny noises or dance or build Lego structures or lose a game in exact accordance with their instructions.
But even beyond my inability to play well, I find that I'm not as fond of toys and games as I used to be. The insteps of my feet bear the scars of run-ins with Legos, Playmobile people, Perfection pieces, Battleship pegs and any of the other hundreds of tiny pieces of plastic that litter the floor at any given moment. Toys have become the enemies of my serenity. And it seems the very items I most want to abandon in front of Goodwill (or regift to some parent I'm less fond of) are the very toys my kids can not get enough of.
Early on in my parenting excitement, I bought my children some of the things I wished I had as a child, like the game Mousetrap. Oh, how I coveted that game as a child, with its cool gears and cleverly cascading series of actions. My parents never bought it for me! Can you believe the injustice? I couldn't. So I bought it for my kids. And I found that it is an awful, awful game. There is really no point to it except the cool contraption, so it's really more a toy than a game. And it is a toy with a thousand parts, many of them painfully pointy and easily breakable should you step on them. A year ago enough of the parts were broken beyond repair that I threw the game out. I even threw out the plastic mice, which the kids liked to play with independently, so that no memory of that horror would ever remain.
My kids seemed to forget it for a time: that is, until my son received a computer version of several board games (including Mousetrap) as a gift. Mousetrap on the computer is a mixed blessing: on the one hand, you are assaulted with an endless musical accompaniment and you don't actually get to build the cool contraption, but on the other, there are no plastic parts to lose or step on. Of course, playing the computer game led Austen to start angling for a replacement version of the board game, and this weekend someone (Not me. Oh, believe me, not me.) got it for him.
This afternoon, the kids played with it for an hour, trapping mice with musical accompaniment by Austen, who happily hummed the endless tune from the computer version. They giggled and shrieked and built away, pausing just once to get my assistance to rescue one of the balls that rolled under the sofa. Then Janie took the mice off on an adventure around the house, and it's uncertain whether they'll ever return to the box again. Apparently, I'm too old to play anymore, but fortunately, there are two people in the house who are just the right age and have each other.
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