At the playground today, some kids, including mine, played an assortment of made up games with a deflated purple basketball that had a hole big enough to use as a handle. I can’t say that I openly encourage such “creative” play, but when I see it happen I do my best to slide into the background because it’s the kind of play, with whoever else happened to be outside, that I remember from my childhood. It doesn’t happen often in this era of playdates and professionally supervised enrichment. Such activity cannot, by definition take place under the watchful eye of an adult –since the job description of adult includes identifying the toy as garbage, throwing it away and producing a new one.
However…
I did feel obligated to step in when the basketball got stuck sitting on the top of a hoop and one of the little boys started throwing a brick up into the air in an attempt to knock it down.