Holiday Board Games

Today we headed out to Kmart to buy a good old fashioned Monopoly Board game for the holidays and while we were there they had a boxed game set of 11 games for $15 so we bought this as well.  It is a box with a slide in lid that has the games on it and the pieces go into the box....an all in one which is great for storage as well.  It has Chess, Backgammon, Chinese Checkers, Drafts to name a few and a couple of games even I hadn't heard of before.  James has been keen to get a chess set for ages and unfortunately for him I do not play chess.  As a child I loved playing Backgammon and Drafts but every time the Backgammon game came out I would have to re-read the instructions again to get started but this was a favourite game of mine.  Of course Scrabble and Monopoly were the other all time favourites.

James decided he was going to teach Sienna how to play chess and he was very patient with her because he needs a chess partner and I was thrilled that he is teaching her.  As she pointed to a piece that she intended to move James carefully explained to her what that piece could do and/or go and they played happily together while I was in the kitchen baking a loaf of bread and getting lunch ready.  Later on this afternoon they set up the Monopoly game and we started our first family game.  I'm a bit rusty with the rules as it's been a while however the instructions are pretty clear and James decided he wanted to be the banker however I was the assistant banker from a maths point of view because some how he was giving change of $100 more in error.  I set him straight on that and we were in business.  We played for an hour however the game is now pending because we've had to drop some DVD's back that we hired, baths and I'm just about to organize dinner so here are some pictures of my two kids playing board games and this from a mother's point of view makes me extremely HAPPY.  The past few months have been frustrating as the sibling rivalry has been an on going issue for me with mostly the older one having little patience for the younger one so my board games were a great investment and I should have got them sooner.  I was very proud of them both today because generally it might be beyond Sienna who has just turned 7 and then James who is just 9 gets somewhat cranky shall we say so both of them made me extremely happy today and they were both happy playing together.  James has just come into the study to ask Sienna if she wants to play another game of Chess and she said "sure"....so cute.  Happy Mother, Happy Kids, Happy Household...now if only that could be maintained 24/7 life would be good.