It’s Friday night. The supper clutter is tidied, and I’m sitting with my glass of something fruity…Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. CRASH. Thump. Thump. ‘What is that?’ I wonder and sip on. Thump. Thump. Thump. CRASH. “MOM, you gotta come see this! MOM!!” I get up. I should’ve known. Of course… Bottle-flipping. I dutifully ‘oooo’ and ‘aaah’ over my son’s latest (EPIC!!) videos of plastic water bottles tossed and landing upright on tables, shelves, stairs, skateboards, and (eeeeek) the top of my van. And I’m not the only parent doing this, it would seem…

Bottle-flipping, the rage with school-aged children, is currently taking the country by storm! If you’ve been hiding under a rock the past few months, I’ll fill you in…Bottle-flipping is exactly as the name implies–a plastic (half-filled) bottle tossed and spun in the air with the goal of landing it upright. Revolutionary! My kids and their friends while away hours doing this! They flip bottles that land on sofas, knick-knack shelves, the play structure at school, the ledge on a fence, the picnic table, the sidewalk, and apparently (if you watch enough YouTube videos) even the golden arches at everyone’s favourite fast-food restaurant! I don’t entirely get it, but I gotta say, as a mom, I LOVE it.

I have a confession. If you had asked the cynic in me if I thought the screen-time generation would have the wherewithal to amuse themselves with such an inexpensive, no-frills gimmick, I would have said ‘Sadly, no.’ And gosh, I’m SO glad to be wrong! The way I see the it, the whole bottle-flipping craze is living proof of everything that is still right with the world! Kids (even with a world of ‘entertainment’ a click away) are still kids—creative, silly, amused by simple things, and totally harmless! Aside from the annoying thumps and crashes, the only victim chez-moi after countless hours of this process has been a decorative china plate of my grandmother’s (it took a tumble off the knick-knack shelf). That’s pretty cool.

Of course, it is 2016, and bottle-flipping can’t just be a fun thing to do with your friends. It has to be ‘trending’, ‘epic’, shared at every turn on social media, and have its own YouTube channel, but, hey, #StillAwesome.