Game Boys

Luckily, I am not referring to the Nintendo gadget of the same name. Rather, Alex and Nate are suddenly game playing fools — the old fashioned kind. Alex is all about checkers, and I am amazed to see how he improves with each game we play. The other day, he brought home Connect Four from his after school program, and the first game we played I tried to be fancy for a long setup for a diagonal win, and he totally and fairly blindsided me with a move that had me unable to win. I was so impressed!

For Nate, it’s Go Fish. He loves it so much that he has started saying “Nope, Go Fish!” in response to every day questions. As in, “Nate, can you please bring me that book?” “Nope, go fish!” Also, even when we don’t have cards, the boys will play imaginary Go Fish, holding their hands up like they have the cards, asking each other for cards. We have a deck with letters, upper and lower case, so it goes “Nate, to do have an N for Narwhal?” “Nope, go fish! Alex, do you have a U for Umbrella Bird?” “Yes, here you go!” etc. They have all of the animals on the cards memorized, though the fake games also sometimes include “S for Seminoles” and “B for Bucs.”

But wait, there’s more. Between the rough week of separation last week and the colds the boys were fighting off, they had no desire to leave the house today. Instead, we played games. Guess Who? Chutes and Ladders. Go Fish. Concentration (the Leap Frog version). Wood Checkers. Tic Tac Toe. Good old fashioned Hang Man on a white board. Randomly spelling words on the Scrabble board. They just couldn’t get enough!