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Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Customized Family Games

OK, I don't know what's happening here. I am actually about to post about something sort of useful and factual. I think my body has been taken over by my 2005 self, or something. If you don't hear anything frivolous and completely useless from me by next week, please come rescue me. Or wait, I was thinner in 2005. Nevermind.

Anyway. I was Stumbling (stumbleupon = single greatest timewaster ever invented, aside from computer Solitaire and the Internet itself), and I came to this site where there was a discussion of customized rules for games. I don't KNOW those people, so I don't want to post there ;), but I thought, hmm. THAT's an interesting topic for a blog post. Everyone plays games, right?

(ooh, goody, a list!)

• The most major updates we've given to any of our games are in the game of Life, which C got for Christmas. We make three changes, based on actual ideological/economic issues with the game. First, we noticed that having kids is absolutely no benefit at ALL in that game, other than the one LIFE card you get when they're born. They cost you money for college and daycare and they ride around in your car with you, and that's it. Since money is the only way of gauging your quality of life in that game (!), we made each child worth 50,000 when you retire. We've thought about making a square where you had to spend all your savings on a nursing home if you didn't have at least 2 kids to care for you, but we haven't tried it yet.

• Also for Life, we found their real estate program to be completely unrealistic. That you could buy a house in your twenties and sell it at retirement for only about one and a half times what you paid for it at best was ludicrous. Come on, we live in California, we know how this goes. So we decided that if you keep your house from the first "buy a house" square till the end, you double the amount printed on the card when you sell it. If you buy it at the second "buy a house" square, or if you sell and buy again, you use the amounts printed. Also, you pay $10,000 rent per payday, which you no longer have to pay once you have bought a house. (there it virtually no benefit at all built into the game for homeowners).

• Some friends of my parents taught them to play "dirty UNO". I am not crazy-fond of the extra rules, but I am in the minority on that, so when we play, we play "dirty", as follows: Whenever anyone plays a zero, then everyone passes their cards to next person in the direction of play. Anyone who plays a 7 may trade cards with any player. If a card of the same color and number is played on top of a card that you placed (say, you play a blue 9 and the next person to put down a card plays a blue 9), you draw that number (9) of cards.

• We adopted the "doubles" rules from Star Wars Monopoly for all games of Monopoly, which makes the game a lot more fun. (I really don't much like Monopoly, personally, so every little bit helps). If you roll double 1s, you can move to any space on the board. Double 2s, you get $100 from the bank. Double 3s, you get $50 from each player. Double 4s, you get a Community Chest card. Double 5s, you get a Chance card. Double 6's, you can challenge any other player for any one of his/her properties; each rolls a die and the higher one gets/keeps the property. And of course we put money from taxes etc. into the middle, and anyone who lands on Free Parking gets them. Who doesn't do that? I was shocked when I found out that wasn't an official rule.

• T and I have a more complicated version of Battleship where you fire a salvo of shots on each turn depending on how many ships you have on the board -- I think it's one shot per undamaged ship. We've talked about working movement into it -- where you can move each undamaged ship one space per turn -- but that would get so complicated and long and frustrating that we've never actually done it.

• LT came up with the idea to step up our Clue games a bit by adding more people and more weapons, and by designating more "rooms" on the board (the staircase in the middle, and maybe some areas in the hallways). The thing is that we have to get more cards just like ours to customize, if this is going to work, so that the backs of the cards all look the same. Then we found out that Clue had done essentially that for us in the late 80's, with their Master Detective version, which was, inexplicably, only made for a few years. We're hoping to buy a copy on eBay.

There are so many websites with ideas for this kind of thing; this is only the teeniest tip of the iceberg of possibilities. So what do you do to make games more fun?

Saturday, September 16, 2006

it's a beautiful life really.

Don't mind me; I'm always a little bit this way when summer starts to end. I went for a walk with the kids yesterday. It was about 65 degrees, blue sky, puffy white clouds, bright sun on a clean world, with brisk clean air that felt good going into my lungs. I literally shouted what a wonderful day! as we were walking. More than once. It's a good thing I don't have to care if people think I'm crazy. Or maybe I should say if they know I'm crazy. A little bit anyway.

I made apple pork for supper. The oven warming the house during the afternoon was a good thing for a change, and the hearty food was exactly what we all wanted.

We split wood in the evening -- 'we' being mostly LT and myself, because T is still on light duty (although he feels better than he has in ages). LT is actually quite good at splitting wood. He's getting really broad shoulders and a deep chest, and now instead of standing as tall as the level of my chin, he's up to my nose (and I'm tall). I'm putting my money on him passing me up in height when he is... twelve. And I foresee plenty of maul-swinging for him in that time and beyond; the reason we started this particular job yesterday was that he was having, shall we say, anger issues, and I remembered how when I was his age, a little bit of woodshed time had been an excellent vent for the kind of pent-up frustration that would otherwise have caused much intrafamily conflict*. LT found the technique equally effective, and I think we will probably be using it rather a lot over the next, say, eight years. Good thing we have a woodstove.

* (Plus when people had been mean to me at school I could come home and do a little bit of imaginative play. Quite satisfying really.)

Next week we're supposed to be in the low 80's again, so I'm going to take the kids to the valley today while it's still brisk and lovely, and we'll do some necessary shopping (I need new clothes, and I actually feel like shopping for new clothes, and we actually have the money for some new clothes, so I am going to capitalize on this rare confluence of events), and we may walk along the creek too, and look for turtles and trains. life. is. good.

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

dream analysis 101 followed by a wacko introspective about housework

What does it mean if I have had a week of very memorable dreams, all involving either a) world-scale disasters such as nuclear war and comet collisions, b) massive failures in various attempts at important tasks due to my blistering inadequacy at, say, walking, or c) both?

Oh yes. It means today's the first day of school.

********************************

update:

School went fine. Everyone was quite cooperative and so it took less time than I thought it might and actual learning took place. Oh, that's nice, Rachel, you might be saying. Then why is it that your hair is standing on end and your chest feels tight and you want to run far away into the hills? Ah. Well. That'd be because of room-cleaning time.

We give ourselves a bit of a problem in this area, I admit. Well, really, we (T and I) give me a bit of a problem, since I'm the one who has to deal with it on a daily basis and he is not. On the one hand, we can't just bring ourselves to be the bohemian, tie-dyed, parents-are-pals kind of parents who tell their kids, "I don't care how messy it is, just keep the door closed," for several reasons: First, we have to traverse their rooms to get to the laundry room and to the clothesline, and LT has to get through C's room to get to his. Second, how do those parents deal with it when it's time to go somewhere and the child can't find a single thing he or she needs, from socks on up? Third, well, we're just not that bohemian, I guess. We're school-at-home types too. Oh. That kind of parents. Yeah.

On the other hand, though, I refuse -- I patently refuse -- to clean their rooms, especially C's, or even to help her clean it, because it makes me absolutely bananas, even more bananas than I am at this present moment and that's pretty darn bananas to tell the truth, to do the work of cleaning with or for her only to have the room be an utter disaster area again within 48 hours. I am Not A Good Mommy when this happens.

So this leaves us requiring the kids to clean their own rooms. LT is not so bad at this nowadays. He's finally figured out that it's a job he has to do and the quicker he gets going and gets it done, the sooner it'll be behind him. C, on the other hand, will cheerily spend all day -- literally all day -- in her room, supposedly cleaning it and then weeping remorsefully every time she gets scolded and/or punished for not doing so. This makes me absolutely insane. Do you ever feel like having your head explode would be so, so nice, not because you want to die -- that would, indeed, be an unfortunate side effect -- but because the release of pressure would feel so, so good? You don't? Do you... have kids? Oh. Must be just me then. Because I feel this way every time it's time for C to clean her room.

And we've tried so many things. We've tried rewarding her for keeping it clean. We've tried racing her to get it clean (against, say, me folding all my clean laundry) and whoever wins gets a prize. We've tried keeping it lighthearted. We've tried spanking. We've tried taking away privileges (there have been times where she was on computer restriction for three or four weeks at a time, all as the result of one particularly nasty bedroom-cleaning incident). We've tried taking away cherished possessions for various lengths of time. I yell. I explain. I rave. The only things that have ever worked are:

1) T or I stand in her room and tell her what to pick up, continually reminding her to move along and not dawdle, until her room is finally clean. (see above re: wreck in 48 hours and I Am Not A Good Mommy, etc)

or

2) She has to clean it every day before she can do anything fun at all whatsoever. Even reading.

Number Two actually lasted for maybe a month last spring. The difficulty with it is that things intervene -- school, a necessary trip somewhere, whatever -- and before you know it three days' worth of mess have piled up and you're back to square one.

Complicating this whole thing is the simple fact that I am not a good example. Sometimes, in fact, I feel like a complete hypocrite, going ballistic at her for stalling and dawdling when my bedroom looks like a clothing tornado went through it and I have four baskets heaped up with clean unfolded laundry sitting in the living room. I rationalize by saying that I'm trying to teach her good habits so that she won't end up like me. Except maybe I should spend the same effort teaching myself good habits, so that I can stop ending up like me. Hmm.

Sunday, March 26, 2006

LT's tics

Shannon asked about LT's tics in a comment on my last post, and I thought I'd write up a quick post about them in case our experiences can help anyone else with this sort of thing at some point.

We started noticing LT's tics for the first time between Thanksgiving and Christmas 2003. He started out (usually when he was nervous or under stress) with blinking, a very deliberate, repetitive huge kind of blinking. When I asked him (about this and his future tics) he said that he felt like he HAD to do it, that he felt uncomfortable if he didn't, that his eyes felt "wrong" if he didn't. Of course that sent me to the Internet to Google 'blinking tic', but more on what I found in a bit.

So far, the tics that I can remember him having are the following:

• Blinking
• Not-yawning (looked sort of like a yawn but wasn't)
• Squeaking
• Grunting
• Throat-clearing
• an aversion to his own saliva which involved him feeling the need to spit all the time, especially when he was around a smell he didn't like or in a crowd of people. The necks of his shirts were unspeakably nasty for a while, and his lips got chapped. This was a VERY HARD habit for him to break, and we all rejoiced when it was finally gone.
• (this one worries me JUST a little bit) He'll kind of pluck at his eyelashes. I know that there's a syndrome (trichotillomania, if I remember correctly) where pre-teen and teen kids, girls especially but also boys, pull out their hair and their eyelashes. It's frequently stress-related, and I confess that any time I see LT fiddling with his eyelashes I have a difficult time repressing the little "I'm such a horrid mom" freakout when I remind him not to pull on them.

A couple that he never had but that a lot of people with tics do have are: a compulsion to repeat the last few words of what he or other people said, or to just say a word or sound repeatedly and seemingly randomly. Thought I'd include those for any future parents who find this page via Google. Hi future visitors! Be of good cheer. :)

Especially in the early days of his ticcing, I thought he had full-blown Tourette Syndrome, and to be honest in those early days I can't blame myself, because the onset of the tics seemed VERY sudden and he was much more prone to them than he is now, two and a half years later. I did a lot of research, and here's some of what I found out:

• For a diagnosis of TS, a person has to have tics for at least a year with breaks of no longer than... two months, is it? And at least one vocal tic and one motor (body) tic had to be present.
• Repressing the tics in any kind of tic disorder is very difficult for the sufferer, and can result in added stress and a veritable explosion of tics as soon as the need to repress them passes (like, say, at the end of a school day).
• Tics are literally compulsions, and for the person who has one, it's just as urgent as a yawn or a blink. Your brain tells your body "do this", just as it does when it's telling you to blink or yawn, and just as with those things, you can hold off but not forever. The difference is that there's a good reason for you to blink in a normal manner; what goes a little wrong with tics is that your brain starts telling your body to do things that don't necessarily make sense.
• LOTS OF KIDS have tics. In fact, anecdotally I found that I seem to be almost the only person I know who didn't have some kind of tic as a child. These are NOT NECESSARILY Tourette Syndrome; they're just 'transient tic disorder', which means, like it sounds, tics that come and then go away. WAY common. I think 'disorder' is a bit of a misnomer, since it seems to be so normal a thing for kids to have. This is what I think LT actually has.
• Even if he did have Tourette's, it was nothing to freak out about. It's not life-threatening in any way and is not an indicator of deeper psychological problems. It's a relatively minor thing, especially since we homeschool, seeing as...
• Most of the people I encountered online who medicated their kids' tics away did so because the tics were a problem at school, either in the classroom where they were disruptive, or on the playground where other kids would torment them, or both. We quickly decided that unless things got MUCH worse, we weren't going to medicate our son, as the side effects of the medications seemed much more daunting to us than the tics were.
• People who make jokes about Tourette Syndrome generally have no idea what they're talking about. It's not just about repeating swear words for no apparent reason, or saying whatever comes into your head without stopping to think, for crying out loud. Also, obsessive-compulsive disorder (which is believed to be in the same spectrum of disorders as TS, along with a handful of other things like autism and possibly ADD) has nothing to do with needing your cabinets to be organized. I am now really uptight about Tourette Syndrome and OCD jokes.

Right now LT is pretty much tic-free, except in situations of extreme stress when a few of them will pop up. Praise God!

In short, Shannon, don't worry. Even if your son has a nervous tic, don't freak out like I did. (oh, the Nameless Dread that I endured for weeks at a time in those days!) It's nothing to be upset about. It'll most likely pass, and meanwhile there's nothing wrong with him. Tics are great; all the cool kids have them. ;)

Friday, October 07, 2005

this blogger's kids

this just happened.

C: [brings me a glass of lukewarm water from the bathroom, with a big -- and now in retrospect I realize, ominous -- smile on her face]
I: "Um, thank you, sweetie. I don't really need a drink of water right now, but thank you."
C: [still with the big smile] "Just drink it, Mommy? Please?"
I: [feeling that something is not... quite... right, I take a small sip and proceed with one of the thousands of little white maternal lies told by mothers around the world over the course of their children's lives.] "Um, thank you. It's -- really good."
C: [still with the conspiratorial smile] "Do you know where I got it?"
I: [carefully not throwing up, but quite possibly with panicked eyes] "Where?"
C: "From my sink well!"
[Things rapidly begin making sense... the lukewarm temperature, the vague flavor of soap and toothpaste, the moisture on the outside of the not-at-all-cold glass.]
I: "Oh. Oh, dear, no, honey, you don't give people water that you had sitting in the sink."
C [big-eyed as only C can be]: "Why not?"
I: "Because -- that's -- kind of gross, sweetie."
C: "Ah! OK." [takes the glass of water to the bathroom for disposal, a chipper, shrugging 'live and learn' echoing in every phrase of her body language.]
I: [between bouts of snorting laughter, take a large swig of Diet Coke and start pulling up this blog entry page; meanwhile:]
LT: "Mommy, you should blog about that."

Sunday, September 18, 2005

the sad and the funny all tangled up together

Tonight while I was on my way across our neighbor's field in order to get to a good spot to try and get a few decent moonrise pictures (and also to get enough stinky stickers on my person and clothing to start a tarweed colony on Mars), I nearly stumbled over what was left of the body of our cat Henry. I barely looked at him long enough to register that indeed it was what was left of Henry, and walked on, but I called T to let him know not to bring the kids over to hang out with me, like we'd thought he might, because we didn't want them to see. We decided that after he came out and moved the body off the path, he should go ahead and tell the kids, though, so they (like we) could stop wondering and finally know what had happened to our little buddy.

C's response was utterly typical of her: fifteen minutes of loud sobbing followed by several hours of intermittent sniffling. LT's was more stoic. He wondered if we should have a funeral -- "and what do people do at funerals, anyway? Is there cake and ice cream?"

Wednesday, August 31, 2005

traumatized

I just had a moment of panic when I realized that due to a recent growth spurt, we had no cowboy boots for LT to wear to our county fair, which starts the day after tomorrow. For nine years, since he was too little to walk, LT has worn cowboy boots to the fair, like a proper country boy descended from a long line of Okies and the like. LT quickly put my panic to rest, though, or at any rate caused it to veer off in another direction, when he told me that he didn't want any. The same little boy who used to run to his room and scramble into his size 3T overalls and little tiny boots whenever Grandpa came over! The one who had Wranglers so small that they must have taken less than half a yard of indigo denim to construct, and the pocket tag was almost as big as the whole pocket! Doesn't want cowboy boots for the fair!

Deep breath. It's OK. I'm glad he's old enough to make his own decisions about what he likes and doesn't like. I guess.

Thursday, August 11, 2005

cardboard sign says "yard sale"

We spent the afternoon preparing for tomorrow, when I hope that many obliging people will come to my house and pay staggeringly small amounts of money to haul away things I no longer have space to store. Oh please. Today was such a better day than yesterday, which ended up being one of the few days when I really really WANT a break from my kids. Or, in this case, my kid, but I won't tell you which five-year-old I'm talking about. I had an "I am the worst mother ever" headache (that is to say, a headache brought on by high levels of stress compounded by an excess of yelling), and it took "Ocean's 11" on the DVD player, some sugar-free ice cream, and a drawn-out relaxing discussion in the dark with my husband to make it go away. Then this morning I had him bring C in for a snuggle before he left for work, and by the time we got up I felt much better in every way.

And then of course today was full of that feeling of satisfaction you get when you finish a task. Drat it, why can't I get that same feeling without all the work? How manifestly unfair.

I'll leave you with a short list of seminars which my child or children are fully qualified to teach:

• Bathtime as Recreation
  
• How To Get Completely Sidetracked Without Even Trying
  
• Mud: Its Manufacture and Use
  
• Heart-Melting 101
  
• The Healing Magic of Malapropisms (with labs: Backward Letters and Cute Misspellings)
  
• Construction Workshop: Tall Piles of Stuff You Don't Want To Put Away
  
• Nutrition 17A: How to Convince Grandpa that Pop-Tarts and Sugared Cereal are Good for You
  

Hurry and book now; the conference season is just around the corner.

Tuesday, July 19, 2005

this is the same child...

...as is pictured in this entry. Really it is.

*Edited: Forgot to mention, she's not grimacing in pain, she's laughing maniacally. She and her brother had been having a waterfight (hence the shield and the water pistol) and she'd started playing in the mud. She swears she wasn't eating it, and I WANT to believe her...)

Monday, July 11, 2005

so much like somebody I know...

Ah, a girl after my own heart. How often did I get dragged along as a child to rather uninteresting (or at least less interesting than a new Nancy Drew book) adult activities, and find some way to bury myself in a story?

Not that, um, I do that now. At all. Nope, way too grown up to take a book with me everywhere just in case I get to sneak in a few minutes' worth of reading at some point. Me?

P.S. The dress was a little much for a baby shower, but she wanted to wear it, and she's only going to outgrow it (very soon) anyway. And no, I didn't make that one, but I wish I had, because I swear every time I take her somewhere in it someone assumes I did.

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