Conehead!

Kids and their weird creativity. I mean, where do their ideas come from? When I was a kid, and hanging out with my cousins, we came up with the game Conehead. This was played in my cousin’s basement. They had two poles that I guess held the whole house up. One person would be “it” and stand between the two poles, and the rest of us would hang on the poles waiting for, well, waiting for the game to begin. And this is how it went:

“It” would yell out a list of random words, “bananas, cornbread, lava, CONEHEAD!”Once the magic word of “conehead” was screamed out, the rest of us ran. We ran from pole to pole trying not to get tagged.My cousins and I talk about Conehead all the time. It’s hilarious to us still.

Fast forward some years to when I have my own little Monster and some step twins. They’re 5 years apart so it’s tough to find activities that all three can enjoy. But the twins are pretty crafty and this past weekend came up with the game “Run from Terry.”

In this game, all three donned new identities. There was Slim, Jim and, of course, Terry. Slim and Jim would run back and forth from one end of the house to the other and hide while Terry would chase after them squealing. The chasing and the hiding is typical kid stuff, the real creativity is in the names. I mean, where did they ever hear the name Terry anyway? Kids aren’t named Terry anymore, are they? And if I got Slim and Jim confused, they’d correct me. How could they even keep track?

As the weekend wore on, they insisted we all have new names and that is how I became Carl Mittens.