What IS It About Boys and Sticks?

We actually had to have a RULE in our home (and for our yard), that you could not play with sticks. Cruel, I know! But it was NECESSARY!

Something about a stick, and a boy. Ok, so not just boys, if you have boys, and girls, the girls have this problem also.

Oh look! A stick!

(Picks up stick.)

No fair! He has a stick!

(Grabs other end of stick – notice the yard is full of sticks.)

(Brief wrestling in which both boys cry foul.)

CRACK!

Oh look! We have TWO sticks!

No fair! You have the bigger stick!

(Drops stick, grabs end of other kid’s stick.)

WHACK!

Where’d SHE get THAT stick?!

(Starts over, with all three kids.)

You see, if there is a stick, they HAVE to pick it up! And it is all down hill from there.

If you clear out ALL THE STICKS, they will find something that is LIKE a stick. And you can NEVER clear all of the things out, they will always find one.

They fight over them. They fight with them. They hit things with them. They break them off things, they break things with them. The only thing they do NOT do with them is clean them up after a storm and THROW THEM AWAY.

Of course, if you do not have that kind of yard, you may not have sticks at the ready. But they’ll find something. Queen Elizabeth II had a clean a tidy yard. There were no sticks, not even after a storm, because she hired someone JUST TO TAKE THE STICKS OUT OF THE YARD! But she gave the boys croquet mallets instead… “Cool! Bigger Sticks!”

She related that after a storm, she and her sister found some sticks in the yard. Her mother asked where they got those! After all the gardener was hired to clean them up. They told her that there had been a storm, and they got these first. They chose the best ones, see? They loved them. They could be SO MANY things! She snatched a stick from one of the girls, and chased them down the hallway of the palace, waving that stick as she went, and explaining loudly and breathlessly just WHY they were not to play with sticks. Destroyed her credibility forever, because while Elizabeth was too intimidated to EVER pick up a stick again, she never could QUITE believe that her mother meant it when she said it was not a thing done. She only believed that it was QUITE unladylike, and QUITE unqueenly. Of this, she knew she had proof.

I have it on good authority that girls love sticks because they are ALWAYS the magic wand. You have to hit things with them. Hard. Or the spell will not stick. Of course, some girls prefer a sceptre… They work just as well for spells, you know, but they are heavier, so the spell sticks better.

(We watched a movie the other night, one we could not finish because it had elements in it that were intolerable, but the one scene I’ll never forget is the one in which the bad guy leers at the girl and tries to attack her, and she lets fly with a tree branch and bludgeons him nearly to death.  It was swift and amazing, definitely an example of making a curse spell stick hard, and I think she should not have stopped… Otherwise she was kinda a flake. But definitely NOT a safe game for playing with sticks.)

There is NO safe game you can play with sticks. Trust me. My kids played ALL OF THE GAMES with sticks!

So we HAD to have the rule.

And they still played with sticks. Badly

THIS STORY and many more can be found on Amazon, for Kindle, in Laura’s storybook: A Little Romp Through Laura’s Storyland