They fingerpaint. They watch Nickelodeon. They climb trees and play freeze tag. Their latest planned project was to stage gruesome snowmen deaths in the fashion of the cartoon “Calvin and Hobbes” after the first good snowfall.

And yes, they’re students at the University.

Welcome to the Treehouse Society, a brand-new Registered Student Organization that allows students to regress back to childhood without feeling silly or stupid. The gang that comprises the core group likens their organization to a perpetual elementary school icebreaker.

Their enthusiasm is contagious. The new club began with a lot of energy at the beginning of the semester – their first official start at the University – and everything began on Quad Day.

“Quad Day was cool, because we didn’t really know how many people would come, but we had a lot of people interested; there was a lot of support,” said co-founder and president Henry del Rosario, sophomore in LAS.

On Quad Day, it’s easy to get overlooked by the throngs of students and leagues of booths and tables. But if you saw a person dressed up as a tree that looked like something from “The Muppet Show,” and that tree was promising to help you find your inner child, chances are you met Brittany Serenbetz, sophomore in LAS, who is the treasurer and one of the main gears in the club’s machinery.

“Henry and I went to a lot of clubs last year, but we didn’t really find something that fit us, so we decided to make something that was different,” Serenbetz said.

Del Rosario and Serenbetz set out to design their own specific niche, and their idea attracted a lot of people to their sign-up list.

“I signed up on Quad day, and the only reason why was because they had a DVD of ‘The Life Aquatic’ on their booth,” said Eli Chen, freshman in ACES.

But the real question is, what happened after everybody signed up?

“I got e-mails that the club was going to be playing games on the Quad and have a picnic, and I was interested in that. We played ‘duck-duck-goose’ and ‘capture the flag,'” said Michael Adams, freshman in LAS.

But Serenbetz and del Rosario did something else at the first meeting, just to make sure that all 40 people there knew that the club was more than just childhood games.

At the end we gave everybody paper hats and said, ‘We have a surprise ending for you,’ and we turned out the lights and came out with a cake and sang, ‘Very Merry Unbirthday To You,” Serenbetz said.

That moment pretty much divided the people who stayed with the group for the rest of the semester, with those who said ‘thanks,’ and never came back. The Treehouse Society believes in being yourself, and if that means serving a cake while singing the Unbirthday song from “Alice in Wonderland,” then that’s just part of the experience.

The group estimates that they plan about two major events a month. Their last outing before Thanksgiving break took them to Staerkel Planetarium at Parkland College to watch “Prairie Skies.” Previously they hosted a Halloween party, but not the type that most University students engaged in.

“We went trick-or-treating in Urbana,” Serenbetz said. “It made people so happy!”

The entourage included a goat, a pirate, Link from the “Legend of Zelda” games, a panda, a communist, and others.

“I went as one of the characters from ‘The Watchmen,'” said Seth McCann, freshman in Engineering.

Afterwards they all returned to play the board game ‘Catchphrase.’

Crafts are also an active part of the group’s liveliness. Del Rosario’s apartment is filled with evidence: hand-made wind chimes, fingerpainting murals, costumes and papier mache crafts. Social chair Martha Jimenez, a sophomore in LAS, brandished her papier mache creation.

“I made a penguin, but the butt caved in,” she said

With all of the kid play and innocence, there is a real motive and message behind the games of tag, the crafts and kid-friendly movies and television shows.

“It was like an experiment, basically,” said del Rosario. “I know there are people out there that this club would appeal to. Our goal of the club is to reach into the self-conscious and that’s why we do these silly things, because then you’re not self-conscious. If you’re willing to go to a weird club to fingerpaint, then you’ve got a tolerance level that’s pretty big, and we’ll expand that.”

Taking a figurative snapshot at the group’s latest get-together, a wide variety of students were playing around and laughing as if they had grown up in the same neighborhood together since they were kids, and yet not one member shared a class with another. The group was diverse in terms of study concentrations, including engineers, writers, environmentalists, and international specialists. They were also diverse in terms of men and women, race and ideologies.

“Oh, we’re mostly diverse in music taste,” said del Rosario, who is planning on having a CD mix mystery swap for the holidays. “Some people listen to some pretty weird stuff.”

The Treehouse Society is already hard at work, planning events for this winter and next semester. They plan on going ice-skating and are undoubtedly doing something innocently devious for April Fool’s day.

“When you get older, it gets harder to meet new friends,” said Serenbetz.

If so, then this club definitely knows how to knock down those walls.

“As an adult you put this veil over you, and this club is just like recess, where you get to be a kid again,” del Rosario said.

If you want to be a kid, and you don’t mind playing the ‘fast-food game,’ pretending to be a piece of meat racing around and looking for two buns, then visit the Treehouse Society’s website: www.uiuc.edu/ro/ths.