What silly or unusual traditions does your family have?

These are all making me smile.  I just remembered another one that we did for a number of years.  It started because I was working two jobs, one full time and one part time and was always so busy.  I wanted to make sure that I devoted at least one night a week solely to my son.  You know, something he could be guaranteed would always happen and I wouldn’t have my attention scattered.  Originally we called it Cinema Night and we would go out to dinner and then to a movie of his choice.  It was done on a Wednesday night.  Well, after 4 or 5 weeks, we both got tired of going to the movies.

I didn’t want to stop doing something though.  I had this large vintage clear glass jar that I put in the middle of the kitchen table.  We sat and made a list of all the fun or weird ideas of things we could do for our evening together, wrote them on individual slips of paper that he then glued to a colorful strip of card stock and we rolled each one up and tied it closed with ribbon.  The object was for him to pick one on Sunday night before bed to be done on Wednesday nights.  I had him pick a few days in advance so that I had time to get supplies together.  For some reason, we still called it Cinema Night although we never wrote “go to the movies” on a slip of paper. 

We would continue to add ideas to the jar any time something occurred to us.  And if we really enjoyed doing one, we put it back in the jar to be picked again another night.  If it was not all that fun, we tossed that idea after doing it once.  Sometimes we would think of something and not tell each other, just writing it down and rolling it up to add to the jar.  Any idea was welcome, it just couldn’t be really expensive and it had to be something that we could accomplish in the one night.

These are some of the things we did on Cinema Nights:

* Round night.  Our dinner consisted of everything round.  Meatballs, peas, and we squished tater tots into round balls before cooking them.  Desert was those round chocolate bon bon ice cream things.  Then after dinner we went bowling.  On a repeat of this night, we went to the golf range to hit a bucket of balls.  

*Pig night.  We ate pork chops for dinner, spoke in pig Latin, and didn’t have to take a bath before bed.  For entertainment I filled a tub with dirt, added water, and we played in the mud, making mud pies with cookie cutters and his beach toy molds. That kid could speak pig Latin like it was his only language.  I was impressed.

*Movie night.  Although we never went to the theater again, we occasionally had movie night with a video that I bought or rented. The first was The Little Mermaid.  I brought the two lounges in from the pool and put a beach towel on them.  We put our bathing suits on to watch the movie.  Dinner was fish sticks, spinach (that was pretend seaweed,) a handful of those Pepperidge Farm Goldfish crackers, and I put blue food coloring into 7-Up for ocean water as our beverage.  We watched the movie and then since it was summertime,  we went swimming in our pool, pretending to be mermaid and mermen.

*Backwards night.  We ate dessert before dinner.  The dinner was plated upside down, like gravy on the plate and then added the mashed potatoes.  We wore our clothes inside out and at bedtime, we put the pillow at the foot of the bed and climbed in that way.  We ended the night by saying, “bad morning, I hate you” which brought giggles galore.

*copy night.  We did this one often by choosing different things to copy.  Sometimes we were the characters in a book that I had read to him, sometimes we became characters in a movie.  We had watched “The Gods Must be Crazy” so we tried to copy the characters in the movie.  We put hot dogs on skewers and cooked over the fire pit in the back yard, sitting cross legged on the ground.  I remember we dipped them in ketchup, which was pretend blood, but I can’t remember why.  We communicated with pops and clicks like they did in the movie.

*Roll reversal night.  He became the parent and I became the child.  This was his idea and he thought this was going to be amazing, getting to boss me around and making all the decisions himself.   He decided to order a pizza for dinner because he didn’t want to have to cook by himself, which I was relieved about.  He could cook, but I always supervised and was right there to help him, but could not on roll reversal night.  While he set the table, I played a video game.  So far, so good.  He liked giving the pizza guy his tip and bringing the pizza in.  But when he called me to eat, I kept saying “in a minute, I’m at a good part” which he HATED (and I loved because he saw how annoying it was so he never did that to me at dinner time ever again.). He had to wash the dinner dishes himself while I went outside to play with the dog. I was a complete brat.  I was put on timeout.  He had such high hopes for that night, but ended up tearing the suggestion into bits and throwing it away.

*Experiment night.  I had picked up two white lab coats at the thrift store associated with the hospital.  I made little name tags, Dr. his name and Dr. Mom, and pinned them to our lab coats. We had to refer to each other as Doctor Mom and Doctor his name throughout the night.  I accidentally called him sweetie and he acted all indignant and told me that we just work in the same lab and that I didn’t know him well enough to call him sweetie. That kid always remained deep in character!

 I got out a mini muffin tin, old syringes ( no needle of course) eye droppers, a magnifying glass,  trays and everything we could think of to experiment with.  I put a long table in the back yard and filled it with our supplies.  The muffin tin was filled with bits of everything in the refrigerator.  A bit of mustard, ketchup, jelly, cooked rice, etc,  And things from the cabinets, coffee grounds, flour, sugar, corn starch, food coloring, etc.  Then we mixed and created weird concoctions that we put into little glass bowls.  He was amazed when I mixed cornstarch and water and showed him that if you pushed hard on the surface, your fingers would not go in.  But if you did it slow, they did.  And when you poured this mixture into your hand, as long as you kept it moving, it stayed in a ball, but if you didn’t, it oozed through your fingers and made a mess. That was the hit of the night.

We never let anyone else join in our Cinema Nights and everyone knew that I would not answer the phone or the front door.  It was to be a special evening where he got my full attention and we could talk about anything on his mind.  He adored most of the themes that we did.  And I know some of these things seemed extreme, but it was so helpful for my son.  He was really struggling with some things at his dad’s house and would come home super stressed out.  So much so that I started taking him to a child therapist.  

After we started these silly nights, the therapist noticed a big difference in my son.  I guess he told him a bit about them and the therapist wanted to talk to me about it.  I told him some of our Wednesday night adventures and he said it was a helpful little escape from pressures for my son.  I told him that my son usually opened up and would talk about things that were bothering him during these adventures. He told me to keep it going and to let my son explore and express his feelings. He also said that taking one evening where I would not answer the phone or door while we had these adventure nights let my son feel loved and very important to me.  I usually had a lot of guilt about how much I had to work, both at jobs and in maintaining that big house by myself. I think we both found the Cinema Nights to be fun and bonding.