Make A Huge Giant Mess--The Game

Tonight I inno-vented a new game with the kids, aptly named the "Make a Huge Giant Mess Game."

I went down in the basement to play with Alison, Kaitlyn and Max for a little bit before our hometeachers were scheduled to come over. When I went downstairs, I remembered / discovered that the basement was fairly 'trashed' with toys all over the place. There were a select few bins of toys that still had their contents in place; everything else was on the floor. So, I said to the kids, "Let's play a game! It's called Make a Huge Giant Mess!" Then I took one of the remaining buckets of toys and turned it completely upside down and dumped the whole thing onto the floor. I can't remember if I did or didn't laugh maniacally.

At first, they looked at me in a very puzzled, almost confused way with eyebrows raised. However, being the quick learners they are, they quickly caught on. Within nano-seconds, they were marching around the room 'destroying' everything they could get their hands on while chanting "Make a Huge Giant Mess!" Alison really took it to the next level and made sure to empty the Nerf bullets one-by-one from all 3 of her 18-bullet Nerf gun clips and threw each and every bullet onto the floor (or at me) to ensure that the whole mess was literally as big as it could be--leaving no piece unthrown, no play table or Smart Shopper unturned. Kaitlyn found the bin that was full of empty Easter eggs and proudly walked out to the middle of the room and dumped the whole thing. For the next several minutes we had a blast throwing eggs (and more Nerf bullets) at each other while dodging these projectiles incoming.

Max, however, was appalled by the whole thing and fell to the floor sobbing "I don't want to make a big huge mess!"--which seemed strange because he never seemed to have a problem before.

(A Clearly Distraught Maxwell)

Once the basement looked like aftermath of one of the official 52 F5-level tornados, I let Kaitlyn choose an alarm sound from my iPhone and we guessed how quickly we could clean the whole thing up. We guessed 10 minutes. (It actually took us about 12 or 14 minutes.) Then we started a new game called "Super Speedy Clean Up Game!"--also aptly named. We lined one wall with the now-empty buckets and put a placeholder item in each one (i.e. a lone Easter egg half, a single Nerf bullet, one Barbie head, one Lego, etc.) Then, we counted down and started running around like chicken sans-heads picking up items by categories. First, we attacked the Easter eggs, followed by anything having to do with Nerf. By the time we got to the Lego's Max didn't want to miss out on the fun we were having and starting pitching in and saying, "I found a Lego. Ha ha!" By the time we were done, I think we had the whole basement toy collection much more organized than it was before the whole ordeal even started--and we had a blast doing it to boot.

(12-14 Minutes Later)

In other news, Alison and I today started a Book of Mormon Challenge--reading 2 pages per day until the end of the year to finish by the end of the year. Yesterday at her Stake Activity Girls event they gave the girls a Book of Mormon reading chart and said they could do it with their families. Since Megan was already pre-occupied herself with the 7-Page-per-Day Challenge (to read the entire standard works--Old Testament, New Testament, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price--by the end of the year), I decided that it fell to me to support Ali in the challenge. Unfortunately, I'm already getting smoked! She's several chapters ahead of me.