How to Keep a Child or an Easily Distractable Adult Occupied for 5 Minutes

Sometimes you’re stuck somewhere, waiting.

• In a restaurant (seriously I know your lettuce is pre-chopped, could you at least bring me my salad so I don’t start eating the tablecloth?)
• At the dentist’s office (why does mine only carry issues of Golf Digest?)
• At a wedding (your speech really should be 18 seconds or less, maid of honor)

And you need something to do. Or you have a child or spy a child looking painfully bored. Or your date is getting antsy.

Never fear. All you need is one piece of paper and a pen. That’s it. A piece of paper and a pen and you can distract some poor soul for a few minutes. (The readers that like to wax philosophical will start up about how one could write a poem or encourage youth to be creative with the written word. Ignore those possibilities for a second.)

Instead, make a fortune teller! Or cootie catcher. They’re called both. Sometimes I draw eyes on it and call it a dragon. Whatever’s clever.

First, take your paper and make it a square. Just fold it over til perpendicular sides line up, and discard the rest.

Then, fold the paper in half, then in half the other way, then in half on the diagonals. It’ll look like this when you’re done. (In theory, anyway.)

Fold each corner into the center.

Flip it over and repeat.

Fold that action in half, stick your thumbs and index fingers in the open slot and adjust until you get something like this.

Then write stuff on it.

I do numbers and colors and then on the inside I write messages appropriate for my audience.

“You’ll get an A on your History quiz!”
“Sorry about the repetitive colonoscopies.”
“One day you will be a movie star!”
“Time to get those roots touched up, sister.”
“OICURAQT!” (Go ahead, say it out loud.)
“Remember the time you spilled red wine on my white couch? Cause I do.”

Fun for the whole family!