My friend, the joker

I love little kids. There. What more of a straightforward sentence could you ask for? But it's true; I love little kids, especially ones that want to sit next to me and tell me jokes, even if those jokes make absolutely no sense. I had this experience recently, last Friday night. Our church decided to have a Sabbath meeting all together for a change, and afterwards we had Sabbath treat, watched a slide show of Mr. Maguire's Haiti pictures, and played games for the young as well as games for the old (i.e. huckle-buckle-beanstalk and pictionary).

 

 

Hold it! Do you not know what huckle-buckle-beanstalk is? *gasp* Well, that's okay, most people don't. I suppose you can be excused THIS time. Ahem! Huckle-buckle-beanstalk: a favored game of my childhood in which a certain small item is hidden in a room and then everybody has to find this item. When you find it, without directly giving away the item's location, you go somewhere else and sit down while saying, "Huckle-buckle-beanstalk!" The first person to find it and sit down gets to hide the item in the next round, once everyone leaves, but everyone has to look for it until everybody has found it. That's good ol' huckle-buckle-beanstalk in a nutshell. Although it was intended for the youngsters, the only youngsters that showed up for this part of the evening were the Posts (and even then only Michael "officially" played--Gabriel said that he was looking even though he wasn't playing:) and Timmy, so a bunch of us joined in (i.e. Craig, Gretchen, the majority of the bibleschool, and me).

 

 

Played in the parlor, the game proved to be a jolly success. Even the bibleschool, even Michael seemed to really enjoy it. The only hitch was that little Timothy often had a hard time finding the special item, which in this case was a purple lollypop. Since a basic rule of the game is that you play "hot and cold" if someone is having a hard time, we all proceeded to do so when he was the only one left. However, he seemed to have a misconstrued idea of the game, meaning that he was practically convinced that he had to change directions whenever we said anything, ending up so that all he did was walk around in circles. Realizing that maybe he was too young to know about the game, I carefully explained it to him. After this, when he took a step forward, everyone of course said, "Warmer. . . " but then he would take a step backwards so that everybody said, "Colder. . ."  He kept on like this for a half a minute or more, practically rocking from one leg to the other as everybody inevitably responded with the apt answer. It was as if Timmy were the conductor and we were his choir. A simple shift was all that was required for a response; but instead of singing different notes, we simply chanted, "Warmer. . . colder. . . warmer. . . colder." Pretty soon we were convinced that he was just enjoying his power over our vocal chords. Amy then took the initiative to gently but firmly push or pull (I can't remember which) him in the right direction, which he resisted, but eventually (with persuasion) he was led to location of the hidden lollypop and found it accordingly, with some helpful hints.

 

 

For the next and last round of huckle-buckle-beanstalk it was my turn to hide the lolly pop because I had found it almost first thing the round before (just because it was in a special spot right near the door that I had checked every other round). Chad, who was sitting on one of the small couches observing, suggested with a twinkle in his eye that I stick the lollypop out of the back of his shirt collar. Once I had secured his promise to sit still, I agreed, and shortly let everyone else in so that the search could begin. This time, however, Timothy turned out to be the first one to find it! After a few minutes of everyone searching with no luck, the little fellow spotted it (it was more or less at his eye level) and pulled it out to hold up triumphantly. Fortunately, he made no exclamation or the game would have immediately ended. As a result, only four or five people noticed him and the game continued until everyone had discovered the lollypop's unique location. And thus ended our wonderful time down memory lane with huckle-buckle-beanstalk.

 

 

As I said, we had Sabbath treat, made by my very own dear mamita (Sarah provided us with the popcorn:). As I sat eating my apple pie and ice cream, little Stephen and Luke came and sat next to me; both are very interesting characters, as little boys are wont to be. Luke not only dazzled me with his extensive knowledge of dinosaurs, but he played "blow out the candle" with me on a candle that was far from being lit ("It's plastic, but we're pretending we don't know that," he told me).

 

 

As for Stephen, he dug into his dessert with noisy relish, expressed by the "hmmhmmhmm" noises that he made as he devoured his treat. The funny thing is that when I started to copy him he acted as if I were the strange one, and he practically insisted that he hadn't been making a similar noise when I told him that he had been. Then he started to tell me every joke that he could think of at the moment. After all, "We have a joke book that's the size of our couch," he informed me. Even though part of the time I couldn't always tell what he was saying (or even if I did, it made no sense), I often laughed anyway, just because it was so fun to see him enjoy his jokes so immensely. I wish I could remember all the jokes that this clever little six-year-old told me, but here are a couple as I roughly remember them.  

 

 

"Have you heard this one?" Stephen asked. "Uh, my father is Chinese, um, yeah, and my mother is Japanese, and I'm Japanese-Chinesey!" Or maybe he said, "You're cheesy!" Whichever version he said to me, someone was pretty sure that the latter was Stephen's altered punch line when they heard him tell this joke.

 

 

Or,

 

 

"Um, my daddy is a mosquito, my mommy is a daddy-long-legs, so that makes me a sheepie!" he laughed heartily. This time I was quite stumped, so I confessed to him that I didn't get it.

 

 

"You don't get it?" if he was surprised, he didn't show it too expressively. "Well, I turned into hot water--get it now?"

 

Oh, of course!

 

Not.

 

 

Or all that's what I think he said. Don't ask me to explain the joke--I'm probably more clueless than anybody. However, it still managed to tickle me, mostly because Stevie was so tickled. After all, who doesn't like to laugh just because a kid thinks he's so funny? I imagine people have done it with me plenty of times.:)