the cardboard "town" you & I made - years later, it's still fun

“Papa can we go in the basement?”  That’s a familiar cry when you guys come over.  The basement – aka the rec room – is a cornucopia of toys, games and activities.  We play football, bowl, shoot pool (or play on top of the pool table), dance to music, make popcorn, play board games, hockey and Wii.

And we run around… a lot.

The other day when you & Ainsley came over, we got re-acquainted with an old friend… the cardboard “town” you and I made a few years ago.  It has streets, a neighborhood, parks, a school, playgrounds and even a hockey rink.  We drive the cars around the town, stop to play frisbee in the park or eat lunch at Panera.  The vehicles are characters with personalities and speech… not inanimate objects.

We had forgotten some of the things we used to do… like take the hockey guys off the play table hockey game (one of three we have) to simulate a game.   We each took a guy, positioned him at center ice for the faceoff and shot the puck into the two-dimensional hand-drawn goals. You asked if my car was still in college… it wasn’t… so he couldn’t sit in the “college section” at the rink.

I’ve often found the best games are the simplest games… the ones that run on one fuel: imagination. A piece of cardboard, a magic marker and pictures we cut out and paste.  Making things up as we go – is fun, uninhibited, inventive freedom.