Game Night 2

It was our second attempt at Game Night and it went very, very well! My kids are geniuses! Well, okay, Candyland is a rather simple game and it took everything I had not to throw down a bottle of vodka topped off with a capful of bourbon in order to get through it. But I got through. I lost, dammit! How is it possible that a 35 year old woman can lose at Candyland? If you're unfamiliar with the game, it consists of a board with blocks of colors on it and a set of cards with either a one-colored square or two colored squares. Whichever color you pick, you move to that square. If you pick a card with two squares you get to move up the board even further.

I am not kidding you, every card I got was with one square and it was always the next color in line, so I was moving one space at a time! In the meantime, Tony is getting all the squares with candies on them, thereby moving at the pace of a Nascar racer in the final lap, and Paige obviously got all the double-squared cards as I was stuck with all the one-squared! If I hadn't shuffled them so succinctly, I would've thought they cheated. As it goes with a 3 and 4 year old, their attention span is shorter than a crewcut, so I was forced to plead with them to "Please pick the next card!" When Tony got on the last square, his next card a winner for sure because the last square was a rainbow and I assume that any color would work, Paige got upset.

"But I wanted to win!" She said. So what does Tony do? He picks up her little green guy and puts her in the winner circle.

"There you go, Paige." He says. I was so overcome with pride that I hugged Tony and said "great game." Apparently, Paige has a nasty side and even though she won because her brother is fantastic, she picked up the board and threw it in the air - all the pieces and cards go flying. I just shook my head in disappointment, and she immediately apologized and started cleaning up. It was then that I taught her the lesson of winning isn't everything, it's how you play the game. Blah, blah, blah. But I lost dammit! I stalked into the bathroom and threw one of the one-squared cards in the toilet and flushed. Damn you, Candyland!

After cleaning up the game, I taught them how to play hangman. Paige caught on quickly, guessing the three letter words before guessing the letters. Her first guess was "G-O-D" and although she was absolutely correct, I held out and made her sound out "H-A-T" - she had no idea what I was thinking and damn if I was going to let her beat me at my own game. They would switch off picking letters. The funny part of all this was when I was asking Tony for letters and he'd say, "Doo" or "Goo" or "Ermph" as though they were letters, and would laugh incessantly when Paige and I rolled our eyes. When it got to the point that the man was to take his last breath, I gave in an allowed her the word. It was tough on me. My last word in the final game was, you guessed it, "C-Z-E-C-H-O-S-L-O-V-A-K-I-A". I thought I had them then! Paige's eyes bulged with every slash on the paper that I wrote; she was defeated. I had finally won.

Do you believe the first to letters they picked were "C" and "Z"? It was all over for me - they got it because we've been practicing spelling it every day. I threw the paper and pen at Paige and said, "Draw me a sun or something, I'm done with this crap!" She laughed and drew me a sun.