This weekend Joe asked if he could come home and Marie told us she wanted to visit friends in Mathlyville for the weekend. Elwood and I were talking about which one of us should make the drive, when I said, "...wait a minute! What if Marie drives to Mathlyville and gives Joe the car key so he can drive home, and then they do the same thing in reverse on Sunday?" So far so good: less driving for us, no need for bus tickets. It's always a treat to see Joe and I hope Marie is having a grand time with friends.
Tonight we played Facts in Five, a fun and portable game that our younger kids didn't know about. Elwood and I used to play it regularly years ago, but the thing about having kids across a bunch of years is that some things come and go. If you've never played Facts in Five, perhaps you could use another fun and portable game in your arsenal.
Make a grid, five squares by five squares. Across the tops of the columns, write the name of a category. We have the boxed version, but you can draw your own grids on notebook paper and invent your own categories. Composers, English nouns containing 11-15 letters, philosophers, religious figures, female painters, African countries, you name it. Be careful about choosing something that's too far inside your own wheelhouse, because it might come back to bite you. My family wouldn't override me if I said we would have a "yarn brands" category, but they would remember it and I might have cause to regret it the next time we chose categories. Down the left side, write five letters. If you have the boxed version of the game, you flip over little tiles to tell you which letters to use. If you're winging it, one person picks a five-letter word (preferably not "eerie"). Fill in as many boxes as you can before your five-minute timer goes off.
Here's an example from our last round:
(Maybe it wasn't quite fair to use Emily Erwin Strayer, since she performs under her married name these days. But come on -- Q and E in the same round?! No, thank you.)
A thing to keep in mind is that you take the number of boxes you fill in successfully and square it for each row and each column. When you go to score your responses, you'll get more bang for your buck if you focus on filling in a row or a column more completely, rather than adding something to a blank zone. The difference between 4 and 5 boxes filled in a single row or column is much more important than the difference between 0 and 1, even though it's a little demoralizing to have a category in which you have nothing written down. Scores will vary hugely with category and letter choices. This was a high-scoring round; many are not.
Give it a whirl and tell me how you like it!
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