Games These Days

There is a place downtown called The Village Cafe. It looks like this:

One of my very favorite things to do is take Ben out to special little places like this to order fancy drinks

mmmm, chai latte.....

and play some hands-on, fierce, no-mercy games. Sorry is a favorite, but since we rode our bikes, I stuck an Angry Birds card game and the classic UNO in my purse. 

I"m not sure how nice of a person you (yeah you, reader.) are. Are you humane? Or are you merciless? We are fairly relentless against Ben when it comes to playing games. Jared more-so than myself. Sometimes the family feud gets serious though. Jared has just about quit mid-game during Angry Birds because Ben will run over and whisper in my ear about how he is going to skip his dad's turn. Jared interprets this as an alliance being formed. Then things get serious. 

"You CAN'T form an alliance!"

'da hell, dad?!?

Serious considerations here 

I know that kids need to be challenged and shouldn't just Expect to win all the time. But I'm not sure pummeling your child at checkers every chance you get instills much confidence. That is probably why game producers made games like Candy Land, where no strategy what-so-ever is involved. Keeps the parents from being assholes to their kids. I don't know what we're turning poor Ben into. Certainly he will either turn out to be a poor sport, or win all the sportsmanship awards. 

Perhaps we are strik methods are just to prepare Ben to become a professional cyclist where you are penalized for helping another person during a race. See child, NOTHING GOOD EVER COMES FROM HELPING SOMEONE ELSE!

Speaking of Richie Porte and the recent articles about him... This photo keeps showing up: 

and I know I know, the course was muddy and stuff, but.. can I just say...he just looks way too much like he's about to exclaim "I have a mole?!" 

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