The Gallery - Playtime

Another go at Tara's Gallery on her excellent Sticky Fingers blog. When I saw the prompt of "Playtime"this week , I thought that would be fine as I'm bound to have something in the archive I could pull out.

And then, like last week, fate intervened again. The same morning as I saw the prompt, I went to a friend's house. We have children of similar ages and have been regularly meeting after school on Mondays as her eldest goes to a different school to Monkey, but have not been able to meet of late due to various commitments. We'd arranged to meet a local park but the weather was not good and she needed to wait in for an engineer to arrive. So we went round there, ostensibly for a short time as she was going out for 12.

Eventually, the engineer rang to say he was coming the next day and it was too late for her to get out so we stopped on. As the weather had improved, we decided to walk the children around to the green around the corner from her house to let them have a run around. By this time, we had 6 children under 6 (as my friend was looking after another child whilst her mum went to the gym), an 11 year old girl who was a neighbour and the two of us.

The children loved it. They completely ignored the bats and balls we had brought for them and just ran around for a while, then they decided to play hide-and-seek. Bearing in mind their age, they were suitably rubbish - they weren't good at hiding quietly for a start, and the seekers' counting was somewhat random, but who cares? They had a ball. It dawned on me that this typifies playtime as it should be so again, I grabbed my phone and snapped Missy Woo counting up to whatever it was she was counting up to. Fifty-twelve, probably.

Playtime. Doesn't have to include expensive toys that get broken or parts go missing. The simplest - and oldest - games are often the best of all.

(This is my entry for week 22 of the Gallery at Sticky Fingers. Please visit the post and visit a few of the other blogs participating. It's a great way to discover new blogs)

(Edit - I've also added this to the Play Academy on Cathy's NurtureStore blog. Take a look by clicking the badge below!)

Added to ShowOff Showcase on The Boy And Me on 14/05/11.