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Mom, I'm bored!

© Paula Dundore

I remember when I was a child I used to ask my mother what they did for fun when she was a kid. I was brainstorming for ideas on how to fill my day-- I was bored! Sitting around the television was not really an option. Yes, we had one but the programming choices weren't as numerous as those of today. No cable, no Pay Per View and certainly no VCR's. During the middle of the day, only one thing was on--- Soap Operas. Yech!

My mother would think back (not as far as I imagined at the time) and tell me how they would play jump rope. Jump rope? It didn't sound that exciting, that is until she taught me that jump rope wasn't just holding a cord and jumping. Oh no-- many different games can be played with a jump rope and a few friends.

I don't remember all the names of these games now, and we may very well have made the names up. I do remember our favorite. It was called, Triangle. You had to have at least four friends to play this game and a very long stretchy jump rope. As the name suggests, you make a triangle shape out of the rope by securing it around the legs of three friends. Then one by one you had to jump in the triangle and then out, then in, then out-- all the way around the triangle until you were back where you started. In a "Follow the leader" style, each round had to have a certain "trick" to it. One legged jumps. Scissor jumps. Double jumps ect. You get the idea.

Other sunny afternoons were spent playing "Duck Duck Goose". Remember that one? This one I was introduced to at school, probably because the gym teacher wasn't prepared, or maybe she just had a lot of paperwork to catch up on. Whatever the reason, there always seemed to be one day a month where instead of running the track, or playing softball, we had a Duck Duck Goose day. We didn't mind at all!

If you had one of those big rubber bouncing balls, maybe you played "Four Square". I LOVED playing Four Square. And Two Square was just as fine. You found a peice of pavement, drew a chalk line--- you were set.

Are you getting the hang of this now? Is it all starting to come back to you? "Red Light, Green Light". "Mother, May I?" It seemed we never ran out of things to play once we got started. So, turn off the TV, Mom and Dad, and introduce some of these classic hand-me-down games to your children. This is the stuff memories are made of.

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