Oh today was a rare day!

A day with no school visits, no writing deadlines and no obligations!

I got to potter!

Even though I could have slept in, for the sake of tomorrow’s early start, I got up by 9 am. But it still felt leisurely!

I took care of loads of housework: laundry, cooking, did a facial and some other personal grooming, calling up next week’s schools to confirm the arrangements–all at a less than frenetic pace.

I even had a school in Windsor postpone a school visit that would have been crammed between a four day gig in Newmarket and preparations for leaving for Edmonton the next day!

It opens up my schedule within the next two weeks just enough to give me some breathing room.

Yikes!

I wrote the above at about 3:00 in the afternoon, and wouldn’t you know I spoke too soon!

I did have a deadline! One I’d completely forgotten about. I had promised to answer some interview questions for Papertigers.

So the peace of my pottering day was shattered just like that, and I had to think seriously about play!

What games would I play as a kid if I first met you and where would I play them?

Boy it brought back memories!

I knew a lot of games!

One of them was called Snail. It had a rhyme and a complex movement that from a bird’s eye view formed the shape of a snail.

I remember teaching it to a group of Muslim teen friends and they’d never heard of the game before. They were fascinated by it.

And one of the interesting questions was also about how all that unstructured play as a child led to my creativity as an adult.

I had nothing but unstructured play.

And I think it did play a factor! We were so poor we made up our own games.

I’ll let you know if and when the Papertigers column with my interview gets published, just in case you might want to read it.

Ironically, now that I sent her off the answers (a day  after my deadline) it was a lot of fun.