Behold! Story games invented by my four-year-old.
OLD DAMAGED POLICE STATION.
This story game is played with Magnatiles, marbles, and “guys,” with an alternative sandbox version. There’s an old damaged police station that looks abandoned but actually there are police officers living there. The building is composed entirely of bathrooms and watch towers, and the grounds are surrounded by an elaborate garden (the marbles = lettuce, tomatoes, and pumpkins). Game play consists of tending the garden — police LOVE to garden — and racing into the Old Damaged Police Station to go to the bathroom. Watch out! It’s on an island surrounded by lava.
FARMER HAT, ROBOT HAT.
This is a bathtime narrative. The trucks and occasionally ducks will take a toy boat and put it on like a hat, which looks like a “farmer hat” but it’s also actually a robot hat. The Farmer Hat Robot Hat gives you the power of flight and invisibility, but not at the same time. If you tilt the Farmer Hat Robot Hat, you can show other characters the onboard computer, which elicits oos and ahs. You can buy a Farmer Hat Robot Hat, but the more clever guys will build their own.
CANDY SHOP.
Also a bath game, Truck along with occasional special guest Daddy Truck run a candy shop (the Halloween bucket), and the ducks and other characters line up to buy candy. The candy shop is typically out of your requested favorites (Heath bars, lemondrops, salt water taffy) and what you end up with costs anywhere from $10 to ten million dollars. You can usually get away with giving Truck a buck and running away. Truck will often offer you Mystery Candy. Mystery Candy is raisin bran.
Alternative play: The purchase of candy gives you admission to Barbie World (ala the Aqua video “Barbie Girl”) but if you make the mistake of getting Mystery Candy, you can’t go, because “Mystery Candy is not candy.”
Motherhood is the sheer delight of those amazing, imaginative descriptions. Motherhood is the mind-numbing slog of reading the above 50 times in a row, because that’s how the games are played, over and over and over, on top of the stress of the day and all the things that feel like “real life” till your attention is numb, patience short, brains mashed potatoes.
But I know my favorite sweets won’t be available forever. I’ll get only Mystery Candy, and Mystery Candy will be a teenager in a phone or behind a closed door, locking me out of his interior world and the stories that keep him safe — and the new ones, the dark ones that keep him up at night.
Doing my best to breathe, suspend the moment, strengthen his wards and hug it all tight.
Happy Mother’s Day.
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