Last night we played the board game Clue. This is one of my all time favorite games... that and quarters. Anyway, the kids love to play games and every once in a while when the planets are aligned just right and their Dad is home early and their Mom (me) is not threatening to sell them on eBay, we can actually get along as a family.
The game was Carl's idea. Well, actually it was mine, but I suggested it 5 nights ago and it never panned out and Emma has been begging to play ever since and she finally broke us. I even bought an entire bag of Oreo's to go with our game night. This stressed Carl out a bit. He didn't understand why I thought we needed to eat an ENTIRE bag of cookies and actually DUNK them in our milk WHILE we played our game. Honestly folks... I seriously have my doubts about him ever being a child.
In the end Carl lost. He was trying so hard to win because my husband is competitive at everything he does. He blamed his loss on Hope. He said she cheated.
Hope (being her mother's daughter) said "Oh Dad, I don't cheat at board games, I only cheat at life." Sarcasm has never been something my husband understands and this comment distressed him severely.
He turned to me and said "They didn't learn that from me."
Now, I have to ask you... did that just sound like he was blaming ME for my children's cheating abilities? I think so.
In my defense, I believe that you are supposed to cheat at board games. Every kid in the history of the world has cheated at board games... every kid except for my husband of course who is noble and true and who apparently never played board games when he was a kid because his mother thought they were the work of the devil and believed that her children would eventually buy a Ouija board with their paper route money and find out that a ghost named Harvey (who was also a rabbit) was haunting their basement and Jimmy Stewart was their biological father. I mean... c'mon!
When I was a kid I played board games just about every day of my life. I played them with my best friend Sunny who I know cheated because she always won and so in return I HAD to cheat in order to win now and then also. I cheated against my older sister because, well she was older and already knew how to cheat and win. I cheated against my dad because he wasn't paying attention anyway and I definitely cheated against my little sister because there was NO WAY I was going to be beaten by my punk sister. I don't think I ever cheated with my mom or with my Grandma Pat, but they played games like Old Maid and Dirty Old Lady with me and I liked the names of those games so much that I refused to cheat out of respect.
Cheating is half the fun of a board game. If you didn't cheat in the game of Life, you wouldn't be living in the mansion with a bank account full of money and have neat little pink and blue pegs in your car representing your well-behaved children. If you played by the rules you would have something called "real life" and what fun is that?
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