Charades

Sometimes all it takes is a good old-fashioned pastime from yesteryear to drive home the reminder that today’s kids don’t need modern technology as entertainment.

Whether it be knuckle bones, marbles, elastics or hop scotch, there’s nothing quite like the pleasant surprise in seeing your children take delight when grasping the concept of one of your childhood favourites.

This week it came in the form of charades. 

We were aiming to head out the door to dinner and the kids were chaffing at the bit. I wasn’t quite ready so, to stall them, I asked their brother to teach them the game I’d taught him earlier that week. At school this term they are studying film-making and part of his homework assignment was to choose a movie and act it out.

Although the twins were a little too young to understand it fully, they were all over it.

One would come and whisper to me their idea for a topic behind closed doors while the other two had their ears pressed firmly against it on the other side, before fleeing, giggling, back to their seats as the door opened.

Soon, they’d exhausted their collective, mental library of movies (one can only shake their butts like Gloria the hippo in Madagascar so many times) and we moved onto books.

Master Seven went into his sibling’s room to peer at their bookshelf, with them hot on his tail.

When he emerged we took our seats (I had now succumbed to the game).

He thought for a moment and then we watched perplexed as he threw himself on the floor, rolled onto his back, opened his legs for a nanosecond and squeaked out the word “Pop”, before continuing to roll over and stand up.

“What was that?” I asked.

“Do you give up? The book was “The New Baby”.

“Is that how you think you came into this world?!” I spluttered with laughter.

By now his siblings had cottoned onto the fact that he was onto a good thing and were keen to get in on the action. Silliness descended and they all began throwing themselves on the floor and popping out babies.

Game over.