Jonathan's Sleepover

One gets behind in this bloggin' thang, particularly at this time of year and especially if one takes a few days off.

Today, I return to the sleepovers that we had with the kids after Christmas. I can skip the Christmas Day sleepover because I've already posted about that, so let us proceed to the two single sleepovers.

The kids had been due to go home on Boxing Day after their Christmas sleepover together and then return separately a few days later, but JJ decided to stay and have his personal sleepover that night.

With JJ, we play games. To be cooperative, Danica will join in when there's four of us, but it is not what she wants to do when it is just her with us. 

While we had played Sorry with the two of them when they were both here, it is better with 4 people than 3, so we preferred to play other games when it was just JJ with us. We played backgammon with him, or at least I did. Sue was helping him for awhile, but he was soon doing well enough on his own. It's a good game for strategizing, and he was picking it well.

Our backgammon games were close. At the end of one, I said that I would need to roll double ones to win, for I had 3 pieces out on the board to his 2, and mine were all on the very first point from Home. I could only get them home by rolling ones, and I would need 3 ones to get them all home. In other words, I would need to roll double ones because that would let me make 3 moves with 1 left over. I announced this in jest, but amazingly, I did roll double ones.

That reminded me at the time at Ron't cottage when we played some sort of board game involving die. I was well behind, but at the very end, I rolled double sixes, twice in a row to sneak the win. I had been so far behind that no other doubles would have sufficed. I presume now, although I don't remember for sure, that was equivalent to rolling 8 sixes while he had to sit and watch, and I therefore snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. Ron just about had a conniption. I mean, what are the chances?

Generally though, it is a good thing that I don't gamble because I am not usually lucky at games, even though it happened on these two occasions. I have previously posted of my woes at Monopoly where, without exaggeration, I seem to spend all of my time either in jail or paying taxes and going bankrupt early.

Mostly, however, Sue and I played UNO with JJ: lots and lots of UNO.

We all took turns winning, but memory tells me that Sue won more than JJ and I.

JJ picked up a rule variant from somewhere and made us play that way. Usually a +2 card means that the next person picks up 2 cards and also misses a turn. Jonathan's variation was that if the second person also has a +2 card, s/he (I guess we are now supposed to say 'they', but it's hard for me) can play that, so the next person would have to pick up 4 cards, and so on.

Of course that could and did  keep going. Once, 5 +2 cards were played consecutively, and I had to pick up 10 cards. What a mittful! But wait! In the very next game, Sue found herself picking up 12 cards. Then JJ smacked her with an additional +4 pickup on the next turn.

Although I was also going to also post about Danica's visit, I think I shall keep this post to a reasonable length and so will write a separate post of her sleepover later, probably tomorrow.

Both kids are good to us. At one point Jonathan said something to the effect that he'd like to live with us. Of course, he loves his parents and really wouldn't, but it was a heartwarming thing to say to his grandparents.