Ok, I couldn’t do The Ugly today because, come on, it’s between my brother’s and my birthday. It just didn’t seem appropriate. Instead, I’m going to do the some of the games that my siblings, my neighbors, and I played when we were wee ones.
01 | Vroom Vroom Car.
My brother invented this game. Basically, you get all of the comforters, blankets, and pillows in the house and pile them onto the couch. Then you sit on top of all them in a row and the drive tells you when the bus is turning (Going left! Going Right!) or if we’re going over a bump (“Going up!” *jump*). I can’t remember if this was the case for Ben and Diane, but I usually ended up just burrowing into the blankets as if it was a labyrinth.
02 | Hide the Bone.
This was a variation of the “getting warmer…no colder! Ice! Antarctica!” game where one kid hides something and the other people have to look for it. I remember once I bought an analog, battery-powered alarm clock (that’s right, I bought my own alarm clock when I was still in elementary school because I knew early that I was a nerd. I suspect that little oblong alarm clock started my love affair with analog clocks) and we would use it for the game. My brother would set the time and hide it and my sister and I used the beeping to find it.
03 | Adventures in Wondercave.
Pretty epic title, right? This was a game we played with our neighbors, Mike & Rob. We were all superheros (well, if we want to get into particulars, my sister and I were princesses and the boys were superheros. I rode a pegasus and she rode a phoenix) and our trampoline happened to teleport us into alternative universes where we would have to fight out way out. There was the place that turned everything into pepperoni pizza, the witch that turned our swing set into a giant Oreo cookie and we had to eat our way out, and umm, the place that just had crumby weather.
04 | X-men/Power Rangers.
I was always Storm and I still stand strongly behind that decision. She could fly and she could control the weather. Obviously the best x-lady. And who wants to be Trini? No one, that’s who.
05 | Hostage (aka Tie each other up).
Perhaps not the most inventive game, but it was fun. We were all in Tae Kwon Do as kids and had a ton of belts. So we would take turns tying each other up as well as we could so that the hostage couldn’t get out. We were either really good at getting out or really terrible at tying knots because we always managed to wriggle free.
And I could list some of the games that I played alone when I was little, some of which are pretty embarrassing, but let’s keep it in the family this time.