When I was a young girl, my sister and I played a game where the carpet was on fire and we had to leap over barriers in order to dodge the flames.
I never shared this information with my kids, but somehow they came up with something similar. Instead of being filled will mere fire, their floors were covered in virtual lava: hot, fun and timeless, except in their era the game was known as “Fear Factor.”
My grands visited recently and set up an obstacle course in the living room. They leapt from pillow to pillow, walked across a balance beam of books and ran toward the end-game protection of a cardboard box all to avoid the dangerous and extremely hot floor that was covered in (are you ready for it) lava!
What is it about kids and floors being covered in the likes of boiling glass?
It is, in a word, imagination. Imagination afire, if you will.
I am in awe of the imagination of children. This wonderment increases exponentially as my age creeps upward. Maybe it’s because the years bring me further and further away from the mysteries and miracles of childhood, or maybe I’m just simply remembering and thereby growing closer.
I like to think the latter, but either way, I delight in their magic, most especially because it is so real to them, which makes it real to me as well.
Just last weekend alone, they created skateboards from empty flattened boxes. They cruised the living room on their skateboards for two days straight.
In between, they created a restaurant from lunch scraps of lettuce, hotdog buns, ketchup and pasta noodles. This busied them for more than an hour. All I had to do was pretend to eat the goodies and feign yumminess.
Give a kid a $100 toy and they’ll play with it for 15 minutes. Given them the box the toy came in and they’ll play for days. Such is the brilliance of childhood.
But back to lava.
My personal experience with lava floors has spanned three generations (so far), without the need for any marketing or commercialization. But that could change.
The lava game has officially become “The Lava Game!” - available for purchase at a retail store near you! A quick search online showed me there are at least six varieties of the game on the market. The game I first found includes cardboard volcano tiles (whatever happened to pillows?) along with trivia cards that educate kiddos all about the history of lava and volcanic eruptions.
It’s marketed for kids ages 6 and up, which, in my experience, is underselling kids by at least 3 years. You don’t need to be a kindergartner to understand (and perhaps embrace) the concept of lava carpeting in the family room.
According to the website, game activity helps kids burn energy as they jump and leap while developing agility, balance and coordination. What a unique and original idea!
I wasn’t able to get my hands on the actual product as it was sold out, which just goes to show, I guess, that it’s never to early to commercialize a good idea and bring it to the marketplace.
Had the game been available, I might have considered getting it for my grandkids, but they’d probably end up playing with the cardboard box it comes in instead.
Such is the nature of kids. Thankfully. So very, very thankfully.
— Jill Pertler’s column Slices of Life appears regularly in the Times. She can be reached at slicescolumn@gmail.com.
