People who have more than one child, and people with siblings, often assume that only children are spoiled. They get so much attention that they want for nothing, and no one ever makes them work for anything, is the presumption. I've seen this in some of the stories, for example, about China's "little emperors," where the reporter acts as though it is a foregone conclusion that an only child is a spoiled child.
I'm an only child; my mother was an only child until she was sixteen; Joe is an only child. Honestly, the perception that we are inevitably spoiled couldn't be less accurate. I'm sure some are spoiled, but the effort we have to make to be accepted into adult life makes us different.
On this date, Joe and I were sitting outside. He decided to design a driveway game. Some of these are better than others, and often they're simply a baseball diamond or a "racetrack" to run. But on this date, Joe had to take it easy, because an insect bite on his foot had swollen up.
He devised a game that diverted me from my book -- another habit earned as an only child, the book forever in my right hand competing with "real life" -- and that, honestly, is among the most creative things I have ever seen anyone imagine, much less any child.
He started with two boxes. One ultimately had six circles in it (it started with four), each of which had a letter in it. The letter was the first letter in a word that described an action. Each action has a corresponding symbol -- a pictogram -- that was descriptive in most cases, and at least memorable.
The job of the players was this:
One player drew a story, which was a series of pictograms. The pictograms led from a fictitious man's "house" to the mountains or forest in the distance. Every chapter in the story was represented by a pictogram, such as "run" or "fall down." Every time the player drew a pictogram, the other player had to touch the corresponding master symbol with his foot.
I have never seen anything quite like that idea. It wa non-competitive (with the occasional laugh as the "opponent" touched the wrong master symbol, a la a mistake in "Simon Says"). It was intriguing, and occupying. As is so often the case, Joe fascinates as his incentive to gain attention.
Several more pictures of the driveway game are available on Flickr.
