Our town is small enough that we do walking tours – ending up at the museum on free Saturdays – the first Sat. of every month

And they love to play hopscotch and jumprope.
Or walk to the school and play on the playground equipment without all the school crowd there.

After dark, and during the winter, they are introduced to numerous card games – they’ve been playing since they were about 2, sitting in someone’s lap, but ‘getting’ to play the cards. And board games are a big hit – especially Chutes and Ladders, memory games, dominoes (kid’s version), checkers, and that game with the beans that I can never remember the name of, but they can! And let’s not forget Mr.Potato Head and Cooties!

We also bake together, do the cookie decorations which they get to take home, and they pick out the menu on their stay overs and get to do the cooking (supervised, of course)I think they just love the personal attention! What are grammi’s for, after all!

Until we were ten or eleven, my dad used to do the “under-duck”, which involved pushing one of us on the swing so high he followed through by running and ducking under the swing. That was impressive for a man six and a half feet tall. Sometimes the swing would go so high, my head would be above the crossbar where the swing was attached. If a parent wasn’t around, you could always under-duck a younger sibling or cousin, and in a pinch any adult would do, but somehow Dad’s under-ducks were the most satisfying because they sent you higher than anyone else’s.

We also used to do the “launch” in which we let go of the swing at its topmost point, and went flying off, at which point it would be another kid’s turn on the swing. We often talked about combining a launch and an under-duck, but at the decision moment we always deemed it too dangerous.

There were a lot of other fun things we did with my dad. Until we were about five years old, the “airplane” involved having your sleeve and pantleg grabbed, and being spun around and around, face down, with your arm out straight so you could pretend to be a jet plane. Centrifugal force would spin you out to about waist height. For the under-five set, walking or pretending to take a nap on the ceiling was always an option, but you need a very tall dad for that because somehow it’s not as much fun if he has to stand on a chair. Walking on the ceiling was something my dad came up with as an alternative to the re-enactment of the Dr. Seuss classic book “Hop On Pop”. Sometimes a small child is just itching to be tipped upside down, tickled, or otherwise scared spitless for a few seconds by an adult. Probably it builds trust.

Later on, of course, there were experiments involving a magneto, some black powder, pieces of old engines, wooden swords, electronics components, Ninja throwing stars made out of discarded circular saw blades, and all other kinds of violent entertainment. Many things were blown up or set on fire, and we got to play with matches, gasoline, and various other chemicals in a (relatively) supervised way. We’d also go walking in the woods, or learn important things like how to tell direction or time by the position of the sun. Most of that didn’t cost anything, either, although the 35 mph go-cart, BB guns, and refurbished stunt motorcycles probably did. There weren’t any major accidents during this time and nobody got (badly) shot, burned, or blown up. So my kid brother and I grew up to be well rounded individuals and I (despite the handicap of being female) went on to earn a reasonably good living as an engineer.

Somehow, if we’d grown up without a dad, our upbringing would have been… wussy. Mom’s a great lady but there’s no substitute for the airplane or the under-duck.