Friday, January 30, 2009

First Hide and Seek

Last night, Katy wanted to play "Hide and Seek" with me.  This isn't the first time we've ever hidden from each other, but it was the first time that she requested it by name, and the first time that we had a formal counting period for one person.

The hiding was the hard part for her.  She tended to run upstairs into her bedroom and bury her face in her little arm-chair.  When I was done counting, she would giggle audibly and call to me, "Daddy, I'm in my bedroom."  I think she still misses some of the point.  I would laugh and suggest that maybe she should try to be quiet so I can't find her so fast, but she said she didn't want it to be too hard.

When it was my turn to hide, I would look for obvious places: behind a table or desk, inside her playhouse, in the corner of the bathroom with the door open.  Then, I'd watch her walk the circle of the house, calling to me, "Daddy, where are you?  I can't find you."  When she wasn't right next to me, I'd call out hints like, "I'm downstairs," and "You keep walking by me, look harder!"  It would sometimes take her quite a while, but I think she really liked it; when she had found me, she often wanted to take another turn as the seeker.

When Mom came home, the two of them hid while I looked.  I pretended to have a hard time finding them, and Katy actually did a decent job of keeping the giggling to a minimum.  I eventually gave up and decided to take a nap; boy was I surprised to find that they were in bed, under the covers.