Game Day Sunday

In trying to fulfill my son's needs for competition, challenge, strategy, sportsmanship and all those other more "fatherly" tasks, I found a really great solution: GAMES. Variety of styles, variety of content, NO technology (this is counter-productive in the attention and attitude areas), lots of strategy, lots of togetherness, lots of fun, lots of learning how to HAVE fun when the game is going strongly against you).

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[caption id="attachment_650" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Games played this past week"][/caption]

We have been playing a LOT of games lately. In fact, I've been counting a lot of it as school: logic and mathematics being the main two subjects. But also strategy, planning, fair play, agreement to new rules (see our post on Monopoly Deal - it's mildly better now).

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I've tried to make time every day for at least one game of his choice as well as Sequential Shake-a-WFF (I get too impatient with his style of Competition Shake-A-WFF).

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One of the Great-Grandmas sent us a Christmas check and said, "Spend it on something you want." I called her to say that I wanted the bills paid, and she said, "You *know* what I mean young lady!" (hehe - I'm still a "young lady" - hehe)

So with it, we went to Once Upon a Child and bought a really cool set of pjs for the boy - yeah, he looks spiffy (and he actually *wears* pajamas now!) --- and we browsed the game selection.

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OH! My! The game selection was HUGE, but mostly for littler ones (given the nature of the store, that's understandable). We picked up

• Zooreka (bit of a disappointment - says 8-adult; I say 4-7; it's no longer listed on their website and has bad reviews - probably because everyone expected a higher level game. It's a *great* game.... for 4-7 year olds).


• Clue - the only disappointment here is that he learned the strategy so quick, there's little to learn --- so we'll pull this out when we have visitors - that's a different strategy set!


• (we still had money left so he bought 10 pounds of clay at Hobby Lobby - a post for another day! On HIS blog!)

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So today (Sunday), we were iced-in (my car is encased, it is supposed to warm up tonight and Monday, so I wasn't going to spend an hour scraping ice -- besides the apartment management never salted the parking lot and people were sliding all over - and one of the management employees even "visited" this afternoon - and still nothing was done. Ah well.) SO. We had a game day. Almost nothing but games.

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He was in Seventh Heaven! He's been hoping for this for a long time! He set up all the games and we have been rotating around through them. But despite my Facebook status, we have not yet made it to checkers (we still might).

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Instead, we started making soft pretzels:

[caption id="attachment_649" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Mixing up the pretzels"][/caption]

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I smell them rising as I type this..... MMMMMMMMMM!!!!!!!!!!!

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UPDATE:

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