A couple nights ago, while I was driving us home from work, I asked Eldest if he wanted to play a game of Tree.
“Sure!” He said, brightly, “how do you play?”
“Oh, it’s very easy!” I replied, making it up as I went, “what you do is, as we’re driving along, and we’re looking around at the world, you glance in the windows of the houses that we’re driving by. And when you see a tree inside the house, you say, TREE! and try to be the first one to do it.”
“TREE!” I pointed past him out the window at the lit up tree visible in the window of a house we were passing. He swiveled to look. “Tree!” I showed it again, and he swiveled back to look at a house almost directly across the street from the other one.
Sometimes the game petered off for a while, until one of us noticed a tree in a window and shouted to pointed out to the other one. We especially delighted when we were in neighborhoods of buildings with multiple apartments, and got to point out ones on upper floors. Once, when we were in a fairly wealthy neighborhood, he shouted multiple times because there were three different trees visible through the windows of a quite large house. Tree.
When we got back to our own house, we observed together in disappointment that his sibling had not yet turned on the lights of our own tree, and so we couldn’t see it well enough through the windows to call out for it.
When we got in the car to get home yesterday last night, I had quite forgotten about it. Until we were partway through our drive, and suddenly he called out, “tree!“
I looked, grinning. We played it again for a little while on and off, and agreed together that trees that were outside did not count, only ones that were indoors.
Eventually, he asked me, “hey mom? How does somebody win this game, anyway?”
“Oh, it’s really easy!“ I told him happily, “what happens is, somebody spot a tree, and then somebody calls out tree. And then everybody else playing looks, and sees the tree. And so everybody gets to see a cool tree, which means everybody wins!“
“Oh!” He was quiet for a short while as we drove, until he wasn’t: “tree!“