imagine me with a baby girl

Because of all the time I’ve been spending outdoors with Joey trying to run off some of his energy, I’ve made a new friend in the neighborhood. His name is Noah and he’s six. Whenever he sees Joey and I playing in the yard he comes over and tries to engage me in a game. Yesterday it was fighting ninjas, but since there was only one sword I had to use a partially deflated soccer ball as my ninja weapon.

Sometimes we play budball (a delightful game I created where we pitch unopened rhododendron flower pods at each other and try to hit them with a nerf bat at Eli’s truck. 2 points for the hood, three points for the windshield and five points if you get it IN THE GRILL) and sometimes we play star wars (this is more of a talking game where Noah names a character and I try to guess the color of their lightsaber. It goes something like this:
Noah: Darth Maul.
Jaeme: Red!
Noah: Luke Skywalker
Jaeme: Um, blue?
Noah: Han Solo
Jaeme: Green?
Noah: HA, I tricked you, HE’S NOT EVEN A JEDI!!!!

And on it goes until I request that we play something I could win at like crushing ants with rocks.

Noah’s parents gave us a playhouse for Joey when Noah outgrew it. It’s a huge plastic house with windows and a door and it even has a doorbell and a phone on the wall inside that rings. Joey loves the house so much that he runs for it whenever we step outside and he would happily live in it if we’d let him. So the other day Joey was in his house and I was loitering outside, bored to death, but responsibly keeping guard in case Joey got bored of playing inside and decide to jump out a window. And Noah, hearing Joey’s cries of glee as he opened the playhouse door, then closed the playhouse door, opened the door, closed the door, decided to come over and see what was so fun. He had a little plastic ball with him, a little bigger than a tennis ball, and with it we created a delightful game that was big fun for everyone to play.

It started when I innocently tossed the ball into Joey’s playhouse through the window to distract him from whatever joy he was pursuing in there (probably eating spiders out of the corners) and suddenly the ball came flying back out and Joey’s grinning face appeared in the window right before he slammed the plastic shutters closed. So I tossed the ball back in through the door and once again it came flying back out while Joey giggled hysterically inside the house. I quickly decided that the ball was a grenade and the object of the game was to get it into the house and then give Joey six seconds to get the grenade out of the house before it blew up. We guarded the doors and windows, we threw the ball in at weird angles so that Joey wouldn’t be able to locate it quickly, we distracted him by one of us making silly faces at Joey through the door on one side while the other person tossed the grenade through a window on the opposite side. It was all quite fun and eventually, because of our advanced covert weapons skills, Joey went over the six seconds and I had to blow up the playhouse.

I grabbed the roof with both hands and shook the house while Noah banged on the walls and we both made hideous noises to simulate the total destruction of a plastic playhouse by grenade explosion. We played this game for an hour, with the explosions becoming more forceful with each grenade missed, and then finally we had to end the game because in all the excitement Joey blew out his diaper.

A few hours later when Eli was home from work and we were eating dinner, there was a knock at the front door. Eli went to the door and it was Noah asking if we could blow up the baby some more.

Eli looked at Joey sitting in his highchair happily wrestling with a piece of pineapple and then over at me innocently sipping my wine and I knew I was going to have to explain how I spent my day creating a fun war game for little kids. Again.

Comments

[hubs]

That entry almost made me blow out my shorts. hilarious.