If You Give A Kid An Obstacle Course

Like most parents of young kids, we have a house full of books.  And like most kids, my boys only want to read a small handful of them.  Over, and over, and over.


Since adding a few to the collection, Cael and Graham have enjoyed the "If You..." series of books (e.g. If You Give A Cat A Cupcake, If You Give A Pig A Party) where in some painfully caudled animal is gifted an item or event, leading to an utterly preposterous series of Jumanji-level events, and eventually cycles back around to the animal requesting what they received in the beginning.

Sounds like Christmas morning in my house.

We always read these books and laugh at the ridiculousness of the story line.  If I could suspend my disbelief long enough to actually imagine feeding a moose a muffin, I would have to draw the line at helping him put on a puppet show, or handing over my best bedsheets for him to dress up as a ghost.

Events simply don't unravel like that... until they do.

If you build your kids an obstacle course, they won't be able to wait for you to finish before they start tackling the challenges.

They may ask you to tape instructions on the floor so they can remember what to do, and when.

After they've completed the course a few times each, they could decide to do it backward.  Or upside down. 

Pretty soon they'll stray from the obstacle course and start leaping off the walls and furniture like little parkour experts.

After a bit, they'll get pretty sweaty and ask for water.

When you pour one of them a drink, another boy might run into him and spill water all down his clothes.

That will remind him of swimming, so when you're in the bathroom, he might fill his cup up three more times and pour it out over his head.

Swimming might remind him of summer, so the kids will pretend to swim by sliding all over the floor.

One of them might actually run to his room and put on trunks.

When he's there, he might see a pile of light sabers and invent a new game.

While you clean up the obstacle course mess, the boys could attack three stuffed animals, a fake plastic doughnut, and a large dust bunny with the light sabers and a pile of diaper wipes that they unloaded from a new pack.

They'll probably ask you for some tape to connect the wipes into a tarp to cover the stuffed animals.

And chances are, when they come upstairs to get the tape, they'll see that you've cleaned and ask for a new obstacle course.

The End 

(of obstacle courses in my house...)