Within thirty seconds of arriving home this evening, I was playing charades with the girls, using a deck of cards that has a labeled picture and two other words on it. As intended, the girls play the game by looking at the picture and then trying to act out what they see. Julia is passably good at it, since her two additional years of life help her distinguish, say, “boxing” (a picture of a shirtless, boxing-gloved man in the classic “put up yer dukes” pose) and “bouncing a ball” (a picture of a happy kid dribbling a red ball). Vivi, on the other hand, can’t always tell what the picture is. She insisted that “bouncing a ball” was the appropriate guess for the boxing card, for instance.
To her credit, she never got upset when I didn’t immediately make a correct guess, which is actually quite tough to avoid since every time she looked at a card, she said, “Oh, dis is an easy one – vewy easy,” and then said aloud what she thought the picture showed. Occasionally she was right, but often she was amusingly off the mark: bouncing a ball for boxing, airplane for helicopter, snake for worm, “mixing cake” for doing the dishes.
What’s more, she also acted out pretty much every picture the same way: standing up, then violently swinging one or both arms either up and down or side to side. Pretty much everything got this treatment. She acted out animals – any animals – by running around the room while she did this. Thank god she’d just announced the “answer,” so I could – after ducking and/or stifling my laughter – venture a guess. She was so excited that I could figure it out each time. I hope I’m not leading her to an ill-considered career as a professional charades player.