Tunnel of love
posted in Family, Games, OmegaDotter, Parenting |The OmegaFamily has a nightly routine. We eat dinner (usually late, sigh), then, between the end of dinner and the beginning of the bedtime ritual, is OmegaDotter’s “eleven minutes”. This is her time to play with daddy all by herself.
(”Eleven minutes” can be anywhere from an actual 11 minutes to an hour, depending on the night. As for why it’s 11 minutes and not, say, 10 or 15–well, OmegaDad has an interesting quirk. When he uses the microwave he refuses to use any number divisible by five or any of the standard time divisions. Thus, you find him firing up the nuker for 31 seconds rather than 30, or 6 minutes and 2 seconds. OmegaMom rolls her eyes at this.)
Sometimes the “eleven minutes” is spent playing with horsies, sometimes watching a video, sometimes hide-and-seek, sometimes a big Bad Guy roaring, “WHERE IS SHE?!?!” as she giggles and flees, or sits on his shoulders giggling as he whirls around “looking” for her.
Last night, for whatever reason, they decided they needed a tunnel. OmegaDad was stumped for a minute or two, then had a light-bulb moment. They marched out to the garage, and returned with OmegaDad carrying a bunch of flattened Home Depot boxes.
I deduced that the boxes were being made into a tunnel, and heard much hilarity for a few minutes (”My butt is stuck!” quoth OmegaDad), then the dotter dashed in, grabbed my arm, and started pulling me back into the living room, saying, “You have to see this!”
The boxes marched across the living room, flaps overlapping and taped here and there. OmegaDotter vanished into one end, boxes bumped and jumped, and she emerged from the other end.Â
Then she demanded I do it.
Erm.
I gave the boxes the hairy eyeball. They didn’t look really large enough for me to do what the dotter was doing–scamper through on arms and legs. And I feared I would end up saying, as the dad had said, “My butt is stuck!”
But I gamely squirmed in one end and proceeded to do a Marine-style crawl through the boxes, pulling myself by the elbows and wiggling my lower body as I progressed.
(Hallelujah, ladies and gents! I have discovered the be-all and end-all to tummy exercises! I’m sure if you did this ten or twenty times every night, within a few weeks you’d either have a hellacious bad back or else a svelt new figure…)
And then OmegaDad and I watched as the dotter chased the Wooly cat through the tunnel, and he, in turn, chased her.
And then it was time for bathroom and toothbrushing and bed.
