boomerang wrote:So.... how do you play, fishin'? Is it a game that can be discussed in a family forum!?
Oh yeah. It's mostly used in schools nowadays. I think I learned it when I was in 1st or 2nd grade. We'd play it when the weather was bad and we couldn't go outside for recess.
The teacher would pick a small item (like a button or an eraser) and pick one kid to stay and have all the others leave the room. The one kid that stayed in the room would hide the item. Then everyone else would ocme back into the room and look for the item. If you found it you were supposed to sit down in your seat and yell out "Huckle buckle bean Stalk!". The others would keep looking until, one by one, they found the item. The 1st kid to find the item got to be the next one to hide it for the next round.
Ohhh! I like that game.
I will begin playing that one with Mo right away. Maybe he'll be still for 5 seconds.
We do a game called "Easter Egg Hunt" where I hide eggs all over the house and he finds them while I get a few minutes to use the bathroom or talk on the phone or something.
I read about "blob tag" the other day and it sounds like a fun game too. The first person that "it" catches hooks arms with "it" and they have to chase the next person down, who then links arms while they chase the next person down.
Why didn't anyone think of blob tag when I was a kid?
I played that!
The one I miss is snow tag, where you stomp out a complicated interlocking pattern -- usually starting with a large circle that's bisected a few times, then various little tangents -- and can only run on the stomped-out part while you play standard tag. I introduced it to sozlet and her best friend when bf was over for a playdate and it had just snowed but bf got all cold. :-( It's hard to play with just two.
Can't we start some sort of planned community where Boomer, FreeDuck, shewolf, me, and whomever else all have houses that back up to a common greenspace and we shoo the kids out the door and they go crazy?
Sounds like a great community. I'd live there even without kids..
Ahhh, this brings back good memories of birthday parties. My parents threw the most elaborate parties for me when I was li'l', and mom would check out all these old game books from the library and find neat games no one played anymore. <sigh>
We had one called snake that was kinda like chuckle belly in that it sounds kinda weird to describe and you gotta be pretty comfortable with the group of people, but it was a lot of fun.
Oh, the good old days...
the 'kids, go on and go crazy' parenting style was the one my parents employed. I don't remember any of these games. I do remember kick the can and truth-or-dare. But, mostly we just ran around in the woods like children raised by wolves.
When I was a kid the rule in my neighborhood was "when the street lights come on you need to come home".
That meant that everyone with a BB gun tried to shoot the street lights out on a regular basis.
And we all had BB guns.....
... so the street lights never came on....
Snow tag sounds like great fun.
As does the planned community!
Here's a surprisingly dour true story involving Huckle Buckle Beanstalk:
In elementary school, our white-haired gym teacher would have us play the game on days he was hitting the sauce extra hard. It seemed a suspiciously pointless activity when, usually, we were running 100mph kicking red rubber balls.
Labeling him an alcoholic was simply a fun joke at the time. I think we just liked the sound of the word, "alcoholic." We knew nothing about the truth.
Years later I was a summer groundskeeper for the Public Schools where I grew up. In a "fallout shelter" beneath the high school (built, obviously, in the 1950s) I found a mysterious file cabinet containing dated, yet cryptic documents. One of them was a note to the superindent by an administrator, concerning a bottle of whiskey some kids had found in my old gym teacher's desk at school.
I thought back to all the bruises and scrapes he used to have. He would tell us he had been trying out his grandson's skateboard. What a lie. And I had been so mean to him as a boy.
Ah, childhood. What innocence! What fond memories!
