“Daddy, can I play on my iPod?” The Boy had called my old phone that he uses for games an iPod for as long as I can remember. Sometimes he just calls hit his phone. For a seven-year-old, some details are unimportant.

“What did Mama say before she left?” I asked. I’d just gotten home, and K had just left for a showing. We like to be consistent, to make sure kids don’t start playing one off the other. Not that our angels would ever do that.

“She said no YouTube and no television,” he confessed.

“Well, let’s generalize that to ‘no electronics’ and say ‘No,’ okay?”

“Okay.” A pause. I knew what was coming. “What’s ‘generalize’?”

“It’s when you take something specific, a detail, and make a broader category from it. Like if I were to say, ‘apple’ and ‘orange,’ what category would those both fit into?”

“Fruit!”

And there we had it.

“Daddy, can we do this for a long time? Can we play this game for a long time?”

I love how so many things become a game for him. We played the generalization game for a while, each taking turns listing two items and having the other figure out what category they fit into.

No bigger themes; no lessons learned. Just a fun little game that we might never remember to play again but got us both smiling for a few minutes today.