My son Josh was a boundary banger. From toddlerhood right on through middle school, he hit any boundaries as hard as he could to see if they held.

 Often I felt like a human boundary line, worn out from my son's insistent defiance. Wear a coat? Nope. Get

Wasn't there more to mothering than saying, "No" and standing firm? I wanted something more than battle lines. I wanted fun times with my son. I wanted to make memories echoing with shared laughter.  

So I bought a green and orange plastic lizard.

If there was one thing I knew about Josh--other than that he was tenacious--I knew he liked any kind of challenge. Board games, races with his dad, figuring out puzzles that frustrated me. Now it was time for a new challenge--one that we could share, rather than facing off against one another.

My plan was simple: I would hide the lizard and challenge Josh to find it.

My first attempt at hiding the lizard was fairly easy. I snuggled it down in his tennis shoe, chuckling as I thought about him finding it the next morning as he got dressed for school. (Josh was about eight or nine years old at the time.) Sure enough, he did. Kinda' hard to miss something stuck in the toe of your tennis shoes.

 But Josh didn't laugh. Instead, he wandered into the kitchen with a bemused, "What's going on, Mom?" look on his face.

"What's this?"

 "Great! You found it. Now, you hide the lizard and I'll find it."

Now Josh was smiling. I knew he was already plotting the perfect hiding place.

And so it began.

I found the lizard--we never did name it--under my pillow, nestled among my shampoo and conditioner bottles in the shower, and between my car visor. 

When it was my turn, I tucked the lizard in Josh's bookbag, in the refrigerator behind the ketchup bottle and beneath the couch pillows. 

Josh's most memorable attempt was when I found the lizard residing under the toilet lid during a middle of the night bathroom run. Another time, I crawled into bed, rolled over on my back and saw the lizard staring down at me as it nestled in the light fixture on my ceiling fan. 

We misplaced the lizard a few times. Sometimes a hiding place was too good and the lizard languished unfound for months.   As Josh grew up, our competitve game was forgotten for the most part. But when then-fourteen-year-old  Josh packed his bags for nine weeks in Kenya, I hid the lizard in his duffel. When he was eighteen and  moved into his college dorm, I mailed him the lizard. Who knows? Maybe I'll figure out a way to send the lizard on his honeymoon, too.

Sometimes the simplest things--like a two-inch long plastic lizard--are just the the thing to have some fun with your kids.