Sock Marble Soccer

My daughter Shael, my wife and I were visiting her brother and his family (4 kids). She had discovered that their clean sock collection had far outpaced their sock-pairing efforts. Shael, shall we say, "invited" us, en famille, to a half-hour or so of collective sock-pairing.

She didn't have a game for us to play, but she sure had a reason. And she also knew us well enough (like family) to assure her that we would not only get the job done playfully, but if there was a game in it, we'd find it, and we'd get the game played, too.

So we approached the task in precisely that manner - out of love and fun, of wanting to help and wanting to play. It was a sock mass of considerable size. Finding an actually matched pair was clearly going to be a daunting task. Daunting enough that the finding of such never failed to merit massive praise from fellow match hunters. 

One of us, I can't remember which, began sorting the socks into colors (an admirably practical thing for us to have done). Eventually, we all joined in the task. It was a lot easier to do, and hence a lot more general fun. Ultimately, we each claimed dominion over a certain color, or two, or shared a pile, like the black, brown and blue (one pile) or white (yet another). It took us at least fifteen minutes before the first sock ball was launched. I think it was then that we invented sock marble soccer.