I'm Thinking of a...

Whenever I need to distract my kids from something (whining, crying, killing each other) I have a little trick up my sleeve.  It’s a guessing game called “I’m thinking of a…”

You can put any word in that space.  Person.  Animal. Truck. Place.  The possibilities are literally endless. 

I like to whip out this game when my head is about to explode because no one is listening to me and everyone is calling everyone else a “Goldfish Baby” (don’t even ask) and screaming. 

Then I’ll just yell “Let’s play I’m thinking of a truck!” and it’s like magic.  They stop fighting about whatever they were fighting about before and start fighting about who is going to go first instead.  But when THAT fight is over then we have a really good time with the game.

I usually go first and apparently I always start out with dump truck.  I know this because Carter has told me “Mama, you ALWAYS start with dump truck!”

This is how my turn goes:

“I’m thinking of a truck.  It has…”

“Dump Truck!”

“Yeah ok, your turn.”

I could probably switch it up and try to stump them.  But as soon as my turn is over they just go back and forth with each other naming every truck they can think of and I get to zone out for a little while.  So I’ll be sticking with dump truck, thank you very much!

Sometime Carter is really clever and his are kind of hard to guess.  But sometimes his clues go like this:

“Ok, I’m thinking of a truck.  It has “Shaws” written on it.  It delivers food from Shaws and it’s a truck.”

Hold on.  This one might take me a minute.  God! I know I know this one! Maybe I need one more clue…

“Um…is it a Shaws truck?”

Guess what?  That was the right answer. I knew it would get it eventually.

The other day we were playing in the car on the way to the store.  I heard Carter’s voice but I wasn’t really listening to his clue.  Mostly because I was listening to the voice in my head say: “I need an iced coffee.  Should I stop now or later?  Does that woman walking know what her ass looks like in those pants? I want it now, but then I’ll have to pee while I’m shopping…and if I’m holding a coffee I won’t have any hands to grab the kids when they do something obnoxious.  Jesus dude! Did you really need to get over to this lane that badly?  You’re a douche. Oooh! I like the landscaping at that house. I’m stopping for the coffee first…”

Then all of a sudden I was being called on to name a truck.

Crap I just got busted ignoring my kids.  But there are only so many trucks in the world so I just started naming some:

“Backhoe loader?”

“No.”

“Skid steer?”

“We already did that one.”

“Dump truck?”

“YOU did that one!”

“Big rig.”

“Mom, these are ridiculous answers…were you even listening to me?”

I’d like to use a life line. Is there phone-a-friend in this game? 

Turns out the clue I missed was it’s a truck and it has FedEx written on it.  Had I heard that I clearly would have said UPS truck right away!

While this game is great, it can get old really fast. 

After they’ve gone through every truck they know and every person they came across that day they start doing the same ones over.

 At that point I want to scream “If I have to guess flatbed pick-up truck one more time I’m going to lay down in the road until I’m run over by one!”

But, I mean, it’s fun up until that point.