playing along

Yesterday afternoon I stopped what I was planning to do

(wash that two-days-soaking dirty pot in the sink)

and allowed myself to be caught up in a game with my children.

It was time for copywork and I overheard the game plan of the gaggle of small humans I am raising.

(Is it really overhearing when you are in the same room and it is your own children speaking loudly enough for your neighbors to hear?)

The kids were staging some kind of involved game of police officer.

(Remember when you called every game by its title?  Grown Up.  Mommies.  Church.  School.  Grocery Store.)

Well.

This game was called Police.

And so I jumped in to make copywork seem a little more bearable.

I wrote sentences about a crime being committed – whatever came to my head that instant – oh yes, the cat being stolen.

And I accused a boy scout of the theft, as I recall.

(No judging okay?  It was an off-the-cuff call, alright?)

So they all wrote their copywork sentences with more gusto than normal,

pressing extra hard into the words “criminal” and “police officer”.

Once the words were copied,

I let the mayhem overtake us.

Riley happened to enter from her day at school at about the same time the game was ramping up to full speed.  I was suddenly the criminal (whatever happened to the boy scout?) and had to be on the lam – but not without a hostage.

I grabbed the next to smallest one – she was closet and easiest to lift.

And we booked it out of there.

Riley helped the others give chase but not before Finn and I escaped to the glass castle [mom and dad’s bed] where no one could reach us.

The police officers tried all they could [pounding on the glass walls, creeping through the glass wall] but nothing worked.

Until London returned with her laser ring.

A brown ring that had the power to breeze through the glass.

And then it all got real.

My hostage,

who had somehow morphed into being my daughter and a co-conspirator instead, was taken from me and escorted to jail.

I was captured by two police officers and dragged off to another jail in another country.  (I don’t write the plot, okay?)

And here’s where it got really good.

Here’s where I realized I should be playing these games way more often.

My jail,

the other country to which I was ostracized,

happened to be Bergen’s room.

And my punishment,

the condition under which I found myself obliged to obey,

was to remain in my cell.

Also known as Bergen’s comfy bed.

Then,

miraculously,

my captors shut the door.

My children purposely left me all alone in a dimly lit room in the middle of the afternoon.

Who was I to stop their creative play?

I never received the prison rations I was promised – pickles and bread – but I managed to get a pretty sweet rest just the same.

I hope the kids want to play Police again tomorrow.