Lego guys

When my sister Sarah came for her weekend visit, she gave the kids a collection of Lego people. My kids LOVED the gift. In fact, Jacob still tries to take some of the Lego people to bed with him (yup, it's official, he has attachment issues).

During his quiet times, when Claire's at school and Jacob and Eli are napping, David likes to play Lego. He's been asking me to play with him. Unlike Jon, I do not jump at such requests. In fact, I have long since even tried to build things out of lego with the kids (I think it was about a year ago when Claire surpassed my lego building skills. She was the one to point that out to me. This is what I get for having a husband who passes along his engineering genes to my kids).

My latest approach when I play with David is to build ramps out of tables, pillows, books and boxes and have his Lego cars zoom down them. We see if any of the Lego guys fall out of the cars and then we take them to the hospital. Not sure how long this strategy will work but for right now, David and I are enjoying it.

"Sorry", "Uno" and "Snap"

We've been playing a lot of games as a family these past 5 weeks. Too cold to go outside. Too crazy for me to try to do anything outside the house with 4 kids. So, we've been inside...a lot.

David and Claire got Uno for Christmas and love playing it together. David, in particular, seems to love the game. To be more precise, he loves winning. He'll often try to change the rules so that he does win. He also tries to stack the deck when I leave to get some tea or to get Eli. When he's unable to do that, his strategy is to keep playing new games until he is the winner. I think the record number of games we played in a row was 7.

Dare I admit that I've been teaching him how to trash talk when we play games together?
He's a natural.

"Mom, the brothers are annoying me"

Claire made this comment to me a few days ago.

I can only wonder how many other times she will say this in the years to come :)