Years ago, my husband and I instituted a late-night word-association game. We tend to play it more during certain seasons of our life together, when one or both of us is having a hard time getting to sleep. (The sacrificial love comes in when one of us is exhausted enough to be dropping off but the other is having a hard time sleeping, so the sleepy one wakes up enough to enter into the game...thus often waking up more fully than the other one!)
It's an "easy-peasy" kind of game, as my seven year old would likely tell you -- we play a version of it with her before she goes to bed sometimes too. We pick a letter of the alphabet and a category, and try to think of things that fit the category that begin with that letter. We've tried all kinds of categories over the years, from food to books to movies to intangibles to adjectives...and on and on. We've instituted a few basic guidelines along the way, especially in the categories we tend to play a lot, like movies. In that case, we always count first names for characters and last names for directors/actors. For example, if we were playing "H" in the movie category, we could say both Hagrid and Harry Potter, but we couldn't say Helena Bonham-Carter: she'd come under "B."
My husband is great at coming up with new, creative categories. The most recent one he suggested was "childhood." We decided it could mean any sort of association with childhood, but as you might expect, it's turned out to be more specific to our own childhoods/youth. Last night we were doing the letter "B" and we ended up laughing a lot over some our associations. Here are just a few:
bubbles; balls; books; banana popsicles; Batman; Barbie; Bazooka bubble gum; Bonanza; Brady Bunch; Bee-Gees; Betsy-Tacy; Benji; bicyles; baseball games
There were lots more (including a lot I don't remember because they came in that hazy, blurred horizon between awake-asleep) but that gives you a flavor of the game. It might even give you a flavor of when we grew up ~ albeit several years apart!
So what would some of your childhood memories/associations "B"?
4 comments:
Sounds like a great way to wind down after a long day! Reminds me a bit of playing My Father Owns a Grocery Store on car trips. And the last-night trouble of one person who's really tired and one who's wide awake reminds me of a couple of my favorite Bert and Ernie sketches...
Ah! So I guess Bert and Ernie get to be number one! And Big Bird while I'm at it. And Bilbo Baggins. And bees (not such a pleasant memory). Big Brown Bear (who I still have, and who is pretty ratty-looking). Badminton. Blackberries. Beverly Cleary. Bugs Bunny. Blue and white (go Penn State!). I could do this all day...
Hee! We had several of the ones you mention...Beverly Cleary, Bugs Bunny, Bilbo Baggins all made the list. I can't believe I forgot Bert and Ernie and Big Bird (I was a major Sesame Street fan). Dana had a couple of bears on the list too. I had a lot of bears, but none of them had B names that I recalled. I tended toward calling them things like Cocoa. :-)
I was marvelously uncreative when it came to naming my Number One Teddy Bear... :-P Which reminds me of my major Watership Down phase, and the fact that I had several stuffed Bunnies, and named one of them Bigwig...
Erin, we're up to "G" now -- a lot of nights where it's been hard for me to get to sleep lately! :-)
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