See this kid?
Sweet, innocent, charming and jovial.
She is also the inventor of The Butt Game.
I will not go into the specifics, since they make for unacceptable conversation in polite company, but The Butt Game is not something you'd play with your grandmother.
Martin and I walked around the corner to find her drawing the game board (copying from an open book of Anatomy for Children, though it's called 'Beautiful You' or something like that) on our communal family board. A huge, somewhat deformed derrière hovered over weird piles and what looked like a giant peanut with six eyes (you figure that one out--I'd rather not). A couple weeks ago, I put this whiteboard prominently in the kitchen next to the dining table, prompted by visions of nice families who write values and map soccer schedules and nod wisely over little sayings like "We at the ------ house love and respect each other."
We at the Cockroft house play The Butt Game.
For the record, we do not encourage the use of the word "Butt." It just seems like such a snub-nosed, crass word. At one point Martin sighed, "Can't you girls use something else? How about 'behind,' 'bottom,' 'can?" I put the kabosh on 'can.' Seriously? Anyway, it doesn't matter. Our kids shake, fall on, and whack each other (also not encouraged) on the butt. And now we had a game to celebrate all of it.
Martin looked at the whiteboard and turned his head to one side. "Hmm," he said. "That can only be one thing." But just in case we needed clarification, Bea had spelled it out for us at the top of the board. She scribbled away, explaining the rules as she drew. I mean, she really seemed to think we'd be excited to sit down as a family with a bowl of popcorn and play The Butt Game together. She was so happy and oddly genuine about it, we almost felt like we should. The kid had put some thought into it. She had made something.
Mercifully, we didn't get a chance to play it--the rules were somewhat ambiguous; the places you go if you miss a turn were somewhat unmentionable. And before I could take a sneaky photo for this blog, Elspeth erased it, leaving not one trace. And you know that if Elspeth felt the need to erase it from existence, then it really shouldn't have been in our house in the first place.
Still, I think she might have really been onto something. I mean, what kid--you'd think a boy, but my daughters have blown gender stereotypes again and again--would not love to play The Butt Game? I feel as if we've missed our greatest creative-yet-also-lucrative opportunity to date. The one that could have made us millions. Still, you can't do everything. As a parent at the end of the day, sometimes you're just pooped. Likely as not, someone else will patent the game before us, leaving us behind. . .and then we'll be the you-know-what of our own joke.
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