Homemade Fun

I like homemade fun. The kind that you don't need ten quadruple C batteries and a two-hundred dollar hand-held device for. The kind that forces you to talk to other people, or even go outside! The kind that says, "Here's what we have, what can we do with it?" I like it because it's usually free or very cheap, you end up with original ideas, and it cuts down on the clutter of a million little toys making one's home look like a bunch of carnies moved in and left all their crap behind.

Here are just a few examples:

Our good buddy, Joel Brooks, Pastor of Redeemer Community Church in Birmingham decided to make some blocks out of scrap wood. Now he and his girls have tons of fun with the blocks, but the other night we had a fun night and the adults had more fun with the blocks than the kids! He made up a game where each player adds a block to the structure and the first one to knock it down is the loser. You may not believe me, but it beats Wi bowling by a mile and it is one-hundred percent cheaper.





This is a picture of a woman on CNN with hair that looks strikingly similar to the statue below her. That's pretty fun.





My current favorite free "adult" game is Homemade Balderdash. You need about six players, pens and paper, and a plain old Dictionary. (Those are the things people used to use instead of spell-check.) One person chooses a word that nobody knows from the dictionary and everybody else comes up with the best made up definition that they can. The person with the dictionary reads each definition along with the real one, and each player tries to choose the true definition. The reader gets points if the word's actual meaning wasn't chosen by anyone. If a player chooses your definition, you get a point, or if you choose the real definition you get a point. Try it.

As a kid my Mammaw Nita-Ann had her own version of charades that we called "Rum-Pum-Pum." Basically, there was a funny little rhyme you had to say before you did your charade. Somehow, that made it made it funny and special. My favorite game of her's was "I Spy." For some reason we always played it with some kind of a foreign accent, French-ish as I recall. (She said our ancestors were French.)

My great-grandma Barksdale had a very simple three or four room house with only the bare necessities. Among those necessities were always a medium sized rubber ball suitable for kicking around in her front yard in Fyffe, Alabama, some play-dough, and her ready laugh. I remember sunny Sunday afternoons after having the most delicious fried chicken (made the night before and heated up in the oven so as to avoid that hedonistic work of cooking on Sunday) I've ever eaten, her running around on stubby round legs with corn silk white hair in her homemade polyester floral print dress and black flat Sunday shoes having more fun than I could remember up until then. This is the same great-grandma who made for all her many grand and great grand-children stuffed elephants, turtles, squirrels and all manor of unusually shaped animals. All original, no pattern, and all with scraps from her or grandpa Barksdale's old clothes. These are the things I remember, but she was actually most famous in our family for being the best Christian anybody knew since Jesus himself. Seriously y'all.

There was always a piano or a guitar or various other instruments at my house and all my friend's and family's places. We inevitably ended up doing some kind of music for fun, and now I have fun for a living!

Point is, you don't necessarily get what you pay for when it comes to having creative fun.

Disclaimer: To all of you millions of Wi lovers out there, don't hate, create. And to all neat freak carnies, sorry.