Candy Land!

Last weekend, I had a sudden urge to clean out a closet that had been stuffed full of, well, STUFF since we moved into this house almost 6 years ago.  That closet holds our small collection of board games, and as I looked through them, I wondered if Sonia might be ready to play a simple board game.  The first one I thought of was, of course, CANDY LAND!

I have no idea how many thousands of times I played this game when I was little, and I love that it's still on the market.  Sosini loves talking about colors (every time I give her a stick of cinnamon gum, she has to mention that the gum matches my red winter coat), so I figured she might be able to handle playing this simple color-based game.

Not at all surprisingly, Sonia LOVES Candy Land!

"You mean I get to hop my little piece onto TWO different blue squares?"

The board is really over-decorated with ridiculous drawings....  I think it's a little hard for a toddler playing her first board game to follow where the path goes.

But, Sosi managed to figure it out pretty quickly!  I know this game is 100% luck and has no strategy involved (I even read the directions to see if I was mis-remembering how to play the game-- nope), but darn if I don't keep accidentally beating the poor kid.  I always promised myself that I wouldn't cheat on board games to let my child win, but I think I need to let her win a few times so she doesn't get discouraged.

Sosini has been working a lot on puzzles lately, and she has graduated from 24-piece puzzles to 48 piece puzzles.  She can't quite finish the 48-piecers by herself, but she can get pretty darn far.  I also bought a couple of 100-piece puzzles for us to do together, and she helps me far more than I would ever imagine that a 2 1/2-year-old could!  Doing all these puzzles made me remember the fun that my siblings and I had when I was younger, doing jigsaw puzzles together on my parents' trestle table.  So, I bought a 1,000-piece puzzle on sale at Target, and I spent the last 6 days doing it every chance I got.  Sosini helped me (by sitting on my lap and giving me moral support) finish it last night, and now I want to do another. 

Voila!

I love puzzles!  Looks like the apple didn't fall far from the tree.  The Great Sosini may look exactly like her father, but she is a puzzle maniac like her mother.