Playing Games

I have always liked playing games.  I mean real games.  Monopoly, Sorry, card games.  Almost every game has some level of interest to me.  I do not like the following games:  Chess, Stratego, Risk.  These are games of strategy.  These are games I never win.  I like to win.

I grew up in a family that played a lot of games.  I learned how to count playing dominoes and Rummy 500 way before I started school.  Both of my grandmothers loved dominoes and made sure that time we spent with them included a dominoes marathon.  I had one grandma that actually called the other one a sissy because she only liked playing with double sixes.  My Grandma who was a diehard domino champion played with no less than double twelves.  Even when she had cataracts and had to hold the dominoes right in front of her eyes to see how many dots were on them, she refused to settle for anything less.

My grandma who was a more simple person in terms of domino domination, was more enthusiastic about Rummy 500.  She would visit us for a weekend every three weeks or so with Friday night consisting of sitting around the kitchen table smoking cigarettes (she smoked real ones and we "smoked" candy cigarettes that she supplied), and playing cards.  We would play for hours until someone reached 500 points, then we'd have ice cream.  It was amazing that she never won.  She would "mistakenly" miss opportunities to make points that we would then capitalize on.

Playing games with my sisters was usually a different story.  They are both older than me by three years and six years so I rarely won a game.  To top it off, the oldest, Joanne, cheated.  Oh yeah, you heard me.  She cheated!  We would play Monopoly and she was always the banker because she claimed she could count better than us.  When we had to pay the bank she would slip the cash into her own pile instead of the bank.  She always won.  My middle sister, Jeanne, had a strong sense of right and wrong and never cheated, but she also had a "no mercy" rule and also always won any game the two of us played.  However, she was so merciless that she wouldn't just win, she would kill me.  I would get so frustrated with her that I would lunge across the board and attack her in a fit of rage.  She was bigger and stronger so she just laughed, pinned me to the ground and tickled me.  ARGH!!!

Playing games has taught me many life lessons that I didn't even realize I learned.

• Know your strengths
• Challenge yourself
• Show grace
• Have fun
• Never trust the banker
• Play to win, don't play to kill
• Frustration will get you nowhere

Through the years as parents, Craig and I have enjoyed playing games with our boys and have instilled these same life lessons in our sons.  We each have different styles of play that have covered these lessons, but they have been taught, and based on how our adult sons are living their lives, they have been learned.