Ah, I love the smell of baked mice in the morning. The ruthless chef and I have been mixing up the morality of eating animals and counting games lately, playing his current favorite game, Feed the Kitty. Mmmm. Roasted Rat. Yum. The family that bakes together …

We got this game when Wolfie was still new at counting, and he didn’t quite follow the whole “rules” and “turns” concept very well. He couldn’t quite handle rolling the dice, either, so we stole the dice cup helper from my misspent young years running a fixed-dice game on the back stoop of the school playing Yahtzee.

Aside from the fun of playing his game, we’ve been using it to stretch his math skills. Counting mice for each player, mice going in and out of the kitty bowl, using addition, subtraction, and measuring. Recently he added another level of difficulty, requiring we rescue mice using a large cooking spoon. This also turned the game from “catching mice who eat the grain to feed the kitty” through “cooking the mice up for the kitty” to “baking mouse-shaped cookies for the kitty”.

But even without helping him exercise his brain, it’s just plain fun gaming with the boy. And the girl, though she’s still a little limited in her concepts of “rules” and “turns”. It’s just nice to hang out like we did with our family and siblings. Just a quiet snuggly laughing time. Lets us reconnect, catch up, and have fun on screen-free nights.

How do you reconnect with your family and friends? Games? Stories? Movies? Plays? Oooh, plays. He’s already making up stories for story time … I can’t wait to see what our little playwrights come up with in a couple of years. :)