Looking It Up

A friend recently gave us an awesome two-volume set of the ENTIRE Oxford English dictionary. Normally this takes up many volumes, but this set has been miniaturized so that the entire thing fits into two hefty books, with four regular-sized pages condensed onto each page. Reading it requires a magnifying glass, but it's completely fascinating. It gives the first known print references for every word imaginable, and many words you've never even heard of. The kids have been having fun just paging through and looking up new and unusual words.

I think we'll have to have some friends over and play "Fictionary", a game we used to play at family camp when I was a kid, which is the no-cost predecessor to boxed games like Balderdash. One person looks up a word that nobody knows. Each person then makes up a definition for that word and writes it down on a piece of paper, while the person with the dictionary writes down the real definition. Then you vote on which one you think is the real one. We had many hilarious nights playing this game at camp, but you need a really extensive dictionary to play it, especially with highly literate players.

According to the publishers, it would take a single person 120 years to type the 59 million words of the Oxford English Dictionary, 60 years to proofread it, and 540 megabytes to store it electronically

So, the Inevitable Has Finally Happened

Mackenzie beat me in chess. He got me on a move I never saw coming. Wow. I still remember the day I finally beat my dad in Othello. I think Mackenzie will remember this day for a long time too. Damn, the kid is good. Of course, the little stinker used his allowance for an online chess tutor, and he's been checking chess books out of the library. He got a fun one called The Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes: Fifty Tantalizing Problems of Chess Detection. He loved the chess problems in there and deducing the solutions, but was pretty distressed over the non-authenticity of the book. Imagine, Dr. Watson calls Holmes "Sherlock"!!! That would never happen in the Sir Conan Doyle books, for sure.

Child's Play

We've been really into games lately. Sometimes the kids play things on their own, sometimes with each other or with friends, sometimes with us on a family game night.

It occured to me that if you did nothing but just play games all day, you could probably learn just about everything you needed to know. There are games for logic and deductive reasoning (Mastermind, Rush Hour, and Clue are big hits here, and little Miss A. doesn't go anywhere without her Sudoku Addict book of puzzles), games that emphasize math skills (one family game of Monopoly gives you addition through multiplication plus percentages and fractions), most video games require reading and puzzle solving, there are trivia games full of history and Pit for market trading, puzzles and Operation for small-muscle dexterity, and there are physical games like Simon Says, Mother May I, and dodgeball that work reflexes and mind-body connections.

The game I love to hear the most is when the kids, either with each other or with a group of friends, start playing what they call "The Imaginary Game", an ongoing storyline set in some place and time of fantasy. Sometimes they play it in the car or sitting on the couch, sometimes its a big group of kids roaming through the woods or fields or at a playground. It's always changing and ever-fascinating.

The value of play is highly underestimated in our society. The phrase "Child's Play" connotes something easy or trivial, yet it is anything but. Children learn by playing, but more importantly play brings their lives meaning and joy. Now excuse me, I think I hear Sudoku puzzle calling my name...