Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Family Night - 2010

Remember when the family played games together? They would all have those stupid silly grins because they had been waiting for an entire week to land on someone else’s spot and send their not-so-favorite family member back to start? Wow times were simple. We got out the board games right after dinner, and set up the table in game mode, not in eating mode. With eating mode you had assigned seats. You don’t take Dad’s chair; no, you don’t. You could have any chair you wanted if you were playing games. No rules there.

    We had family game night at my house when I was growing up, but it was the kids really that played each other. My parents went to Grandma and Grandpa's house to play dominoes with my aunt and uncle, and I remember playing with my siblings around the standing floor furnace on a cold winter's snowy night. If I remember correctly, the adults drank coffee and we kids had cocoa with marshmallows; the tiny ones, leaving foamy residue and dark chocolate rings around the top of the cups. Family night was important then as it built up great rapport within the family dynamics. I think it's still very important today, too. Families need each other, each person is an important part of the unit.

    Times have changed a bit, that's for sure. No longer are we going to the top of the broom closet to pull out an old box with duct taped corners and missing pieces to the game “SORRY” (We used blue erases to make up for the missing blue pieces and a red jax to make up for a missing red piece I always picked yellow anyway). No longer do we have to gather up the cards and turn them all the right way before shuffling them, passing them out, and hoping no one realizes that the five of clubs isn't in the deck anymore. NOPE..we don't have to do that because now we play our family night games online! That's right, there's an app for that! There's an app for Monopoly, Sorry, Yahtzee, and anything else you can think of. We use to play Scrabble but now we play WORDS with Friends. It's the same thing only different, right?

    Any given night you'll find my family all crammed into the living room, slouching over couches, leaning over the recliner, or me -- worst of the bunch -- sitting in my computer chair with one hand on the phone keypad and the other on Facebook where I try to keep up with a few horse-loving friends in at least two horse-related chat rooms! It's so different, but not really, not when you consider that my mom was on the phone a great deal of the time when she was playing dominoes and we kids were running back and forth from Grandpa's to my aunt's (they lived next door) playing Chess with Cousin Gene, Hi-Ho-Cherry-O with his sister Beckie in one house and Checkers with our Uncle Marvin while he played dominoes with my parents. He was that cool uncle who would walk back and forth and play with us a few minutes, then go back to the boring adults.

    Brandon, Caity, Laura, and I will spend the better part of three hours on our smartphones, trying to slam each other with as many odd combinations, letters placed in just the right place, or letters that really shouldn't have been considered words in the first place; but because WORDS with Friends says they're words then by-golly they're words! I know I used "kart" and "ee" as words but couldn't use "kew" or "Iran". Caity used "moneys" but couldn't use "Tex". Laura couldn't use "tac" but she was able to place something in Japanese that no one had a clue was legal. It is what it is!! POINTS! Somehow those Japanese words always had interesting spellings with higher point values and no one had a dictionary to look up the words to make sure Laura wasn’t lying through her teeth. I don’t think we even knew really how to Google that well back then.

    Friday night was family night, or in our house, nearly every night is family night because get really bored watching TV and decide it’s more fun to blast each other with WORDS or something new that Brandon has found for us to try. Caity holds the record so far of pulling out the highest score; 120 points for the best placement of the word "jump". I think I'm next with 74 points, but hey, I'll take a good steady even flowing game of 12's, 15's, and 18's anytime. The worst thing is when you have a Q but you can't use it. DANG, I hate that! I should try using Gaelic words just to really make things interesting. Laura uses Japanese words, right? It’s fair - - at least a precedent has been set. I could argue that - - not that I would win, but I would have a standing for about a minute. Every minute counts.

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