Go fly a kite
Christmas has been over for more than a month now, and I’m wondering if your house has turned into a junkyard for broken toys yet. Most likely, that happened on Dec. 26, and you’re way over it.
While babysitting my 2-year-old nephew Connor the other day, I discovered that he likes to drag out his toys, scatter them on the floor and then find something new to do immediately after they are strewn all about the room. A game I call, “Cover the carpet with crap.”
Children learn by playing. It’s their day job. They clock in, take very few breaks and whirl through the house like the Warner Brothers’ Tasmanian Devil character, muttering the same indistinguishable noises. My job, as chief babysitter for the day, was to keep the brightly colored plastic toys out of his mouth, and maybe shove some beige-colored Cheerios in there around lunchtime.
We played with Duplo blocks, which are, essentially, jumbo-sized Legos.
Caution: Old Man Rant about Legos approaching. Fasten your seat belts. You know it’s gonna be bad when a sentence starts with, “Back in my day.”
When I was a kid, Legos didn’t come with instructions. You could build anything you imagined – houses, robots, dinosaurs. Nowadays, it’s got to look like the picture on the box. Boring. Where is the creativity in making something exactly like the picture?
I suppose it’s preparing the modern teenager for the Ikea furniture you will build when he or she is in college.
Side note: I used to have a lopsided desk that I assembled myself. It didn’t really come with extra pieces, but I didn’t know where they went. When I moved out of my apartment, it was very easy to disassemble and throw it in the garbage. It came apart by … moving it slightly. In retrospect, I could have learned a lot from Legos that have to be X-Wing fighters or Avengers headquarters.
But I digress, like I do. It wasn’t the “picking up the toys” part that made me ornery. I realized I wanted to keep playing with them. He was done with the blocks, but I wasn’t. I wanted to construct castles, build robots, create cool cars.
There aren’t many days where I get to be a cowboy, firefighter or policeman (in less than 30 minutes, I was all of the Village People).
I got to talk in silly voices. I ran around in circles for a game of tag. I enjoyed putting on puppet shows with a pair of orange socks.
I don’t think we get to play enough as adults. My actor and improv friends have realized that it’s important to have moments of creative play.
Julia Cameron’s book, “The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity,” recommends you take yourself on a play date.
Get out the glue stick, go roller skating, doodle or blow bubbles.
I’ve been wanting to tell some of you this for a long time: “Go fly a kite!”
Just do it with a smile.