game night!

We set out to find and play games all FOUR of us could enjoy together tonight, and brought down Turtle Picnic, a 24-piece puzzle, and an Uno-type game with cartoonish pictures of animals. Things started off fairly well with Turtle Picnic; while A needed to be pulled out of our box o' blocks and reminded what to do each time it was her turn, she understood the concept and indeed beat Dan twice.

Then we broke out the puzzle. A picked up a piece and C screamed, "that was my piece!" and spent the next ten minutes sobbing about how he was Just About To pick that piece up. All the parenting books claim that when you reflect back what your children say and functionally commiserate with them, they will feel heard and get over their issue more quickly. They lie. We specified rules for shared puzzle-doing (all pieces are fair game unless you're holding them; you may not hold more than two pieces at a time) and moved on.

And then the Uno game. We knew A couldn't do Uno on her own, so she was on Dan's team, which lasted about three rounds before she tried to snatch all the discards. We let her have them, but then the picture of the "sister monkey" disturbed her so badly that she refused to play anymore and wanted to do the puzzle again. We tried to do both simultaneously, but since she pulled all the puzzle pieces as far away as she possibly could get from that evil monkey card, pushing half of them under the rug in the process, it was difficult. That was when we realized it was time for bed.