Bored Games

I know Blog, I was going to tell you about when I learned how to drive.  But this one is for the INTERIM.

It's also fun advice for moms and dads out there who don't necessarily like playing the board games. My husband does not like playing board games with kids or adults.  I do, so it works out well that way. Sometimes though, and especially with children around H and T's age, it can be not so much fun for everyone.

But last night I gave it the old I feel like a couple of minutes of self-flagellation but cannot find my leather whip try.  We started out trying to play Cranium, only to find that several pieces were missing. No big deal, we invent things all the time in my house so at the end of ten minutes, some pieces of popcorn were dice and a rosary was the board piece, etc, until we went scrounging for other pieces in other games and found a game WITH ALL THE PIECES.

So we threw Cranium out the window and settled in to play Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader? The players were H, T, E, and me.   So your regular cast of looney tunes.  Of course E is two, so her contribution was mainly sitting in the center of all the pieces and either throwing them at everyone or eating them.. She wins, hands down.

I got out the old directions and started trying to read through those guys while H and T surreptitiously punched each other in the face.  I am not sure if it is just because the game is new, or I am old, but it seemed pretty damn complicated.  There were two boards, many different flashy pieces, a set up that was close to recreating Stonehenge, and then the RULES. Of course but the time I got to rule 33 that was like and if it is  Memorial Day you can't play, I was like F it.

So it quickly became me reading the cards to H and T and making up my own rules while doing a stand up routine for seven and eight year olds which was pretty fun for all. (E at this point realized she was smarter than ALL of the fifth graders and was busy sculpting the City of Versailles out of some leftover gum).

It's nice to see how smart my kids are -- they were answering questions I did not think they would know, and of course they are so close in age.  Right now, Ted is seven and Helen is eight, and what with my made up rules I could throw piles of money of fake money at them for doing just about anything.  I could also make sure they both ended up relatively close to "winning".

So at the end H was the victor by a slight margin of one thousand dollars.  But our rule is the winner has to clean up, so there were no hard feelings.  It sort of reminds me of when E picks out a story at bedtime and each page has a thousand words.  But she can't read so the story quickly becomes.  "Here is a duck"  turn page "Duck is swimming" turn three pages "Duck GOES TO SLEEP".  The End.