Longest Day

It's been a warm and sunny week.  Little Cat has also been lounging around in the garden, and for the odd moment or two, so have I. It's nice to have the deckchair out. We checked out various weather forecasts and to our amusement rain is due from Wednesday lunchtime onwards. And when does the school term end? Wednesday lunchtime of course! Well, we'll wait and see.

I love the marigolds in the garden - most of this year's are yellow but there's also this orange one too, looking as fresh and luscious as an orange ice-lolly (of which we have several in the freezer).

I inflated the paddling pool the other day but the slight slow puncture from last summer had become two punctures and it deflated fairly rapidly. So when I was doing the grocery shopping I got a new paddling pool too. That's warm weather shopping for you - bread, milk, ice-lollies, paddling-pool.. The Boy, though a good swimmer, is not fussed about messing around in water  - too old at 11? (I'm not, at 43..)  Or too much like a cat, like his father? But Miss M adores splashing around in water and was delighted with the new paddling-pool. To be honest I'd have got it anyway!

Today was a slightly cooler day and although there was plenty of outdoor time, we spent some time playing Munchkin Zombies. Oh, and eating leftover pizza from yesterday.  My Beloved had bought the game on a whim last week, but we weren't sure if the kids would enjoy it. Miss M, at seven, proved herself capable of playing it and fine with the adding up involved, but there were tears at the end when her brother won (not because he'd won so much as because she had plans for her next turn and didn't get to play it out), so although there is quite a lot to take in and remember when you first play it, I'd say the 'suitable for age 10 and up' is really more to do with emotional maturity than anything else. The Boy suddenly got the hang of it halfway through and turned into a mini version of his gamer daddy, and trashed us at the end. I'm not very good at games like this and was fairly muddled, though amused by it.

We're gradually finding games we all enjoy - Forbidden Island, Forbidden Desert, Get Bit.. Mostly we've found about these by watching Tabletop. I'm not into board games in the traditional sense, but some of these untraditional ones are great, especially Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert which are co-operative. The Tabletop episode for Forbidden Island had me laughing because John Scalzi's rationalisation for why it was a good thing they lost was the same as mine the first time we lost at it.

I think I'll go to bed now. This morning I was woken at 4am by two men walking down the road having a fight, absolutely screaming at each other. It was a bit unnerving. That was technically just before sunrise, though in fact it was pretty light by then, so it really has been the longest day.

Chicks and chocolate and eggs, oh my

I didn't knit these - I could of course, but I'd never get round to it... There's apparently a knitting group at our local library and they knitted a whole load of these little chicks with creme eggs inside, and the library sold them on their behalf, proceeds going to a cancer charity.  The kids were delighted with them!  They are very cute.

I'm going to admit something here - I used to read on parenting fora and the like about uber-mummies doing Easter Egg hunts for their kids, and thought 'Aye right' (useful Scottish expression suggesting extreme disbelief). Today though I sat down and wrote clues (in rhyme) and hid eggs and clues around the house. And the kids had a wonderful time racing each other round the house, bickering about who got to read the clues and so on. And eating the chocolate. And I got an uber-mummyish glow. It was a sublime moment. However it kept them occupied for maybe five minutes tops. I think you can work out how long it took me to find suitable hiding places and compose the clues!

In another supreme parenting moment, yesterday I made chocolate nests with the kids, though mostly the Boy actually.

 And oooooh, they're good. Mmmmm..

That's one sitting on my keyboard this evening, half devoured. It didn't last much longer.  Miss Mouse won't touch them because they contain corn flakes, which she likes as cereal but apparently is disgusted by in combination with chocolate. Does that sentence make sense? Ah, you get the gist. Nor does she like mini-eggs, weird child. So all the more for the rest of us, eh :-D.

Enough chocolate (never!) - here's a small cat watching us play a game:

I've just realised I've already used this picture on my 365 blog. Hmm, never mind. That was the scene yesterday, and actually this was the scene today, as we set up for a second go:

Yesterday was Table Top Day, a day invented by the Geek & Sundry Youtube channel people (so Wil Wheaton and chums) to get people playing games together and tweeting about it.

Now I'm not a gamer. Computer games very rarely grab me and I hate most board games (Monopoly - spit spit..). My Beloved is, naturally, a gamer's gamer  - he has been a games programmer, he plays computer games, he has a past involving role-playing games, war-gaming and once even LARPing.  He gets all the gaming jokes in Big Bang Theory. I fear I am a constant disappointment to him. All that I have going for me, in a gaming sense, is that in the early days of our relationship we played Day of the Tentacle and the various Monkey Island games together, collaboratively - he was the mouse-clicker, I said 'No, try clicking the  flag/pirate ship/whatever' and we both tried to figure out how you win a pirate spitting-contest. So I have no real history of gaming but in the interests of family something-or-other I bought Forbidden Island which has (phew) no board so is not technically a board game. Instead it has cards which form the game board. And there are no dice of any size or shape. And best of all it's collaborative - the players are not competing against each other, they're working as a team to achieve their goal which is to, er, nick the treasure before the island sinks. The treasures that were hidden on the booby-trapped sinking island to prevent their catastrophic misuse by thieving imperialists. Yeah, shouldn't have read the back-story, should I? Yesterday we won, but today we failed, which made me feel a whole lot better!

So that was fun. No, really! We haven't yet managed to persuade the Boy to join in which is a shame because I suspect he'd figure it out a lot quicker than me, but Miss Mouse is quite happy to join in. Three out of four (plus interested cats) ain't bad.