The Animal Game

When I was a child, one of my favorite games we would play in my family was The Animal Game. The game is very simple: one member of the family gets up and acts out an animal until someone guesses what animal it is and then the person who guessed correctly gets a turn to go act out an animal.

I just got an email from Nate that I'm posting here to give you, dear reader, an idea of the kind of family I come from:

I just wanted to let you know how much the animal game has evolved since we were kids. The animals have advanced a great deal since the days when we exhausted our ideas after dog, cat, kangaroo, and sloth. We played for family home evening and some of the more interesting animals were:

• hydra (Melissa did a cartwheel)
• flagullent
• starfish
• click beetle (that was fun to act)
• magnetotactic bacteria
• sponge (Marsha got it the second I started wiggling my fingers inside my central cavity)
• clam
• photoautotroph (we can't remember if that is exactly what they're called, but I got it in like three seconds after Melissa held up a plant and acted happy, then turned off the light and started eating everyone)
• planarian
• Marsha (I did her gorilla walk thingy and she and Melissa guessed it instantaneously)
• cow (Melissa did a good cow impersonation by chewing cud, pretending to throw up in her mouth, and then chewing some more)

Kevin kept complaining that all of the older kids animals were too hard to guess, which was ironic because I don't think anyone was able to guess one of his. They were all obscure animals no one else had heard of accompanied with really bad acting. Most were extinct or some sort of sea creature he probably saw on a documentary. He also impersonated some sort of germ that he called a "little bear germ." I'm pretty sure that was some sort of name used in a movie at one point. He acted remarkably like a velociraptor when he was the "little bear germ."

I love how much my family rocks. We are, of course, snobs that think we're smarter than everyone else, but we're fun snobs that think we're smarter than everyone else, so embrace it.