There has been a stack of between 3 and 6 boardgames on our dining room table over the last month or so – some for playing solo after my partner and kiddos are in bed, some for having at hand if my partner is up for a game. My older daughter (~2.5 years) looks at them all the time and always comments about how she wants to “play daddy’s games,” to which she’s always been told, “you can when you’re older”.
This past Saturday, while out for a walk with mommy (this is a secondhand account, as told by my partner), she was telling mommy about how “she can play daddy’s games when she’s older” and then, about halfway through the walk, she turns and looks at my partner and says, “I’m older now.”
When they got home from the walk, she was excitedly talking about playing “daddy’s games”. She was so excited (my partner did nothing to confirm her assertions that she was “older now”; that didn’t matter). She climbed up on our tall diningroom chairs (we have a counter-height table and our chairs are really not suitable for toddlers; she doesn’t seem to mind even though she’s taken a tumble off of one before) and started talking excitedly, trembling with anticipation of being able to play one of “daddy’s games”.I felt so bad for her because, as much as I want her to be, she’s just not ready for Villainous, Quacks of Quedlinburg, or Rallyman GT (the games that have been sitting on the table for the better part of a month) and she’s really not ready for Falling Sky: The Gallic Revolt Against Caesar (to be honest, I’m not ready for this one yet; it’s on the table so that I can plod through the introductory play guide, a few hours at a time).
I asked her if, instead, she wanted to play First Orchard which she usually does. This time, it wasn’t good enough! Her baby sister was upstairs sleeping, so as to avoid a complete meltdown, I frantically searched for a new game to play with her. With few other options, I grabbed some Rory’s Story Cubes – she was not impressed; she enjoyed rolling the cubes and lining them up in a line, but she was not appreciative of the story I told her using them.
Dear reader: We have a dark family secret that up until Saturday, my toddler was unaware of. She owns a copy of Candyland. She received it for her 2nd birthday and, much as caretakers of awful secrets have always done, we hid it away – on the top shelf of her closet where she could not see it. I knew this dark secret was, sadly, the solution to my current predicament, but alas, the baby was napping in their room and I could not awake the dark, accursed box from its slumber without also awaking the accursedly-loud-and-grumpy baby from hers.
I assured my older daughter that we would play a game soon… Her little sister must have known, because she woke from her nap around that same time; after my partner got little sis up from her nap and changed her, she also retrieved the brightly-colored, dark secret from its hiding place in the closet and I, for the first time in my life, played Candyland.
I know a lot of people suggest parents engineer the draw pile to ensure a speedy and successful victory for their little ones; it was a lazy Saturday with not much else to do anyway, so I didn’t bother – we just setup and played Candyland, leaving our gingerbread man pawns to the whim of the deck. In total, we played I think 7 times that day; I won 0 times, my partner won 3 times and my daughter won 4 times; yet more evidence that random-chance has it out for me.
Saturday evening, after the kids were asleep, I announced to my partner that our oldest will be receiving a new boardgame or two as a gift soon (which is a shame because her birthday isn’t until November… she may get a present or two, conveniently, on her sister’s birthday which is coming up in a couple of weeks).