Alligators and/or Lava!!!

Did you ever play that game where you can only walk on (or jump between) specifically colored tiles on the floor? Were your parents ever annoyed because you had to take the long way around to make sure you didn't fall in the invisible lava?

I am eight years older than my sister, placing me in perfect big sis=free babysitter position. Sometimes when we were bored at the house, we decided that all the carpet in the den was really lava and we couldn't step on it. We immediately jumped onto a couch and then strategically tossed the accent pillows around the room between the couches so that we could move around the room without being melted by Carpetlava. Oh, the pillows were lava retardant, somehow. Once everything was in place, we then entertained ourselves by jumping from couch to couch to chair to footstool to pillow to pillow to pillow in a big circuit, laughing all the way. We climbed and jumped all over the furniture we weren't "allowed to play on." It was awesome!

It's funny, we weren't allowed to play on the furniture like that because it would wear out the upholstery or hurt the springs or whatever, but we actually had that furniture for most of my at-home life. Imagine if we HADN'T played Carpetlava...that 70s furniture would probably STILL be at the house.

When the parents came home, Carpetlava became plain old carpet again. Boring. Sometimes, we also pretended that the tile in the kitchen was really a swamp filled with alligators. We have this black iron railing delineating the kitchen from the den. The slits in the railing are plenty big enough to place your feet in, so once Alligators were declared, we jumped into the slits of the railing and navigated our way around the kitchen as carefully as possible. We were often told that we shouldn't hang on the railing or play on it because someone could get hurt or because it would loosen the railing from the floor and strip it. But, in my at-home life, no one I knew ever got hurt on the railing (other than one of the neighbors briefly getting his giant kid-head stuck between the bars. He was fine, just scared. It was sooo hard not to laugh at him crying with his head stuck in the railing.) and my dad only tightened the rail once or twice.

Without fail, Mom would call us for dinner while we were clearly maneuvering just out of the Alligators' reach. Then came the challenging task of reaching over the railing to pull a chair away from the table and then swinging over the railing to get into that chair. More planning was involved to get us both into our chairs the same way. Our efforts and sisterly teamwork in these dire situations were rarely, if ever, lauded or appreciated. In our parents' eyes, we were just rushing our kitchen furniture into disrepair...the same kitchen furniture that's still there, in fact.

When I'm a parent and my kids want to (no, must) walk some funky way or path to avoid something I can't see, I'm gonna try to be as patient as I can and remember that A) Furniture is really strong, B)Siblings should work together, C)Avoiding Alligators and/or Lava is extremely important in the development of problem solving skills, and D) Just because you can't see something doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Watch out where you walk, you don't want your feet bitten off by an Alligator or melted by Carpetlava.