Bad dwarves, card games, and Sunday thoughts

The Apprentice is here for the weekend, and she brought a card game that she thrifted (that's my girl). If you've played Mille Bornes, it's a bit like that: you're either a good dwarf miner, or a bad dwarf saboteur, and only you know which type of card you've gotten. The object is to build a path of cards towards three other mystery cards, two rocks and one gold (again you don't know which is which, although there are opportunities to find out). If you can guess who's acting like a friendly dwarf or a saboteur, you can either try to help them or stymie them; but they might be bluffing. If the good dwarves get to the gold, they share it; if the saboteurs keep them away, they keep it themselves. Simple, right? Kids could play this; you don't even have to be able to read.

Here's the thought: sometimes making good choices is about discernment, trying to figure out what the saboteurs are in our lives and squashing them.  (I said what, not who.) What are the positive and negative factors? You can waste a lot of time trying to tell one from the other, and sometimes the saboteurs are going to win even if you slow them down with broken-pickaxe cards. 

The other approach is to keep going with our own tasks (building the road to the goal/gold). You take the good with the bad, extend grace whenever possible, and realize that, in real life, good and evil can switch places. Or what began as evil, God can turn to...gold. You might be better using your turn to put down a path card instead of strewing broken-pickaxes around.

It won't help anyone win the card game, but it might help with the bigger story.

A quick math dice game

Crayons and I have been playing this game (for two players) from Low-Cost, No-Cost Teaching Aids by Mary Ann Dasgupta. She calls it "Tables Dice." You could also play it to teach addition, but we're using it for times tables.

We use four dice, but you could play it with two. You shake two dice, then the other two (or shake two, remember the sum and shake them again). Multiply the sum of the first two dice by the sum of the second two. So you roll a 3 and a 4 with the first two dice, then a 5 and a 6 with the second two; you multiply 7 x 11 and get 77. The other person does the same thing. Whoever gets the greater product gets one point. Ten points wins the game.

Simple, frugal, and very good practice.

Catching up (and Happy St. Valentine's Day)

Last week wasn't a very bloggish week. The weather stayed mostly dry (around here, although not in a lot of other places!) and we did all the usual Squirrel stuff. Mr. Fixit has continued to work on cleaning out some of the dark recesses of the Tree, coming up with some of the most amazing stuff that had dropped down down down. He even managed to find our kids' harp which had gotten (for some reason) put up on one of the joists of the furnace room ceiling (where we keep kites, leaves for the dining table and things like that).

Mama Squirrel went to a church social and played Mennonite Golf, which you don't find mentioned online too much because its proper name is Ten Card Golf. It's one of those very social games like Uno or Cheat that you can learn in a few minutes (because it's easy for other people to help you if you don't have a clue what you're doing), and it can take all evening if you want it to. Although it was cards instead of marbles, it reminded me of the big wooden Aggravation boards that my own Grandpa Squirrel made maybe thirty years ago, much like these. I still have one of his boards, and remember long evenings spent eating snacks and playing "the marble game" with my grandparents and whoever else was around.

Crayons and Ponytails both used the sewing machine, Crayons for the first time by herself. Mama Squirrel helped her make a felt doll pillow and then a fabric book cover--Crayons sewed all the seams. Ponytails experimented with the fancy stitches that Mama Squirrel never has time for, and dressed up a dish towel with machine-embroidered scallops. (An afterthought about that...we have two volumes of a popular children's sewing machine series, which spends a lot of time having kids follow mazes on paper and do non-fabric crafts to get them used to the machine. Crayons and I read through the first book, but she was distinctly uninterested in anything that didn't actually involve "sewing something." The Real Thing. Mama Squirrel had no problem with that.)

We went to a library sale which wasn't at a library, it was at one of their "service buildings," which basically means a warehouse, and that's what it was--boxes of books all over the place, stacked up on racks and in big wobbly piles, with strollers blocking the aisles, toddlers running in between the boxes, and little kids crawling under the racks with parents calling things after them like "do you see any books on renovation under there?" We did find a few books, but it wasn't the sort of place where you wanted to stay very long.

Monday is the Family Day holiday in Ontario. We're not sure yet how we're going to spend it...stomach viruses are still making their way around this area and have criss-crossed through the Treehouse more than once, so we're keeping things open.