On Tuesday morning my wife and I invited 10 small boys to help us celebrate our son's birthday party. When I was a child I squeezed the front brakes on my three-speed bicycle while flying around a gravel corner. That was not a wise decision either.
As a herd of 10-year-olds swarmed our table, inhaling gourmet hot dogs, Jeffrey opened a wide assortment of gifts: Lego, water guns, an Angry People Playing Instruments CD and four gift certificates for video rentals. "We're bored," said the kids when the last gift was ripped. "Let's go get some movies."
I recalled the last time Jeffrey attended a friend's birthday party/ sleepover. His eyes were bloodshot for three days. "It was SO cool," he told me from the sofa the next day. "We stayed up 'till four watching movies and playing Nintendo."
"Did you talk?" I asked him. "Did you do something together?"
"Nah," he said, "they had four TVs. It was really cool."
"Why do they call these things sleepovers?" I muttered. "Who sleeps?"
As the kids loaded the dishwasher, they also pointed water pistols at me and demanded that we rent some movies. "Did you know that watching TV kills brain cells?" I asked. "You guys keep watching TV and you'll be dumber than Silly Putty. I didn't have TV when I was a kid. It's why I'm so smart."
They stared at me with wide eyes, as if studying a real live dinosaur. "You didn't have TV!" they gasped in amazement. "What did you do?"
"Played," I said. "Invented things. Used my head for more than a hat rack."
They scrunched their tiny noses and said, "Let's watch a movie."
"Which one?"
They didn't know. They had seen most of them, but they could watch them again. They thought we should stand in the video store and look. I'd done that before. I didn't think it was a place for small boys.
And so I took them downstairs and lined them up in front of the dartboard. "Let's play pin the dart on your foreheads," I said. No one laughed. They sulked. They frowned. They thought of movies. Undaunted, I drew up a chart and cheered them on in the first ever Callaway Invitational Dart Classic. Soon the smiles returned. When the ice cream came they let it melt. When the rain lifted we headed to the backyard. "We're bored," they said again. "Let's watch movies. Tons of them."
I said, "Let's play Pickle."
They hadn't heard of it. Two of us donned baseball gloves and stood on blankets. I threw the ball in the air, yelled "POP FLY!" and the kids tried to get from one blanket to the other without being tagged. "If you're tagged out three times, you're finished," I hollered.
The games began. Kids screamed. And panicked. And laughed. They slid ten feet on wet grass, then got up and ran like they'd been caught in Mrs. Pike's raspberry patch. I'd rather have kids than grass, I kept reminding myself.
"This is the most fun I've had in my life," panted one. "This is the best party ever," wheezed another. And they meant every word.
Later that night, after the children were tucked in, I sat thinking about parties and parenting. It's easy to give our children everything they want and nothing that they need, isn't it? We plunk them in front of the latest attraction that teaches them things we never would. Believe me, I know. I've done it. It's easy. It's convenient. But it saps their creativity and deadens their souls. Perhaps the worst thing about TV and Nintendo and computer games is not the behavior they produce but the behavior they prevent.
I wonder if the best parties aren't the simplest ones. The ones where laughter is heard and games are played. Where children are loved and prayed with and reminded to make the most of another year. My daughter's birthday is exactly one week away, so I think I'll remind my wife of this. In fact, I can hear her. She wants me to help her pick little pieces of china out of the dishwasher.
