A few weeks ago I mentioned buying a game or two to play as a family. One that I recommended was Apples to Apples, which also has a Jr. edition. We had the original version and bought the Jr. edition for Christmas. My daughter (who’s 14) doesn’t know all of the words or people in the original game and thought she would like the Jr. edition better. I just wanted to post a quick update now that we’ve played both.

It’s a very easy game. Every player gets 5 red cards. The red cards are nouns.

The green cards are adjectives.

The judge (players take turns being the judge) draws a green card and places it face up in the middle of the table then the rest of the players choose the word on their red cards that they think best fits the green card and places it face down on the table. We just throw them on the table and the judge really doesn’t know who’s card is whose. If you have some sneaky judges in your family you might want to have them cover their eyes or turn around or something. Then the judge turns the red cards right side up and selects the one they like best.

What makes this game fun is that you never know exactly what the judge is going to pick – the word that is the best match, the exact opposite, their favorite word, the shortest word… If the judge chooses your word you get to keep the green card from that round. The first player to collect 5 green cards wins!

They do have definitions of the words on the bottom of the card. The definitions on the green cards are accurate.

while the ones on the red cards aren’t always very helpful.

I love the Chicken Dance.

My daughter had been asking for Apples to Apples Jr. for a while. She hated getting the cards she didn’t know, like “doing the dishes”. (I’m just kidding, she knows what doing the dishes means, she just doesn’t participate in that activity very often.) It is one of the games we got for Christmas.

We had my husband’s parents and his brother’s family over for dinner the weekend after Christmas. The adults (notice I didn’t say grown ups, there definitely weren’t many grown ups involved) played cards while the kids played Apples to Apples Jr. The kids ranged in age from 10-16. We could hear them laughing in the other room. Eventually the older people switched to Apples to Apples. The kids somehow ended up in our room and we played together. It was FUN! We read the definitions on the words the kids had trouble with but they still played the cards they weren’t sure about.

The next weekend we went to my dad’s for my step sister’s birthday. This time we started out with Apples to Apples Jr. It just wasn’t as much fun. I think because the words are simpler, there aren’t as many opportunities for twisted combinations. We ended up switching to the regular version after the first round.

So, my recommendation? Get Apples to Apples Jr. if you’ve got really young kids or if you think you might have kids playing together. If your kids are a little older, or if most of your playing will involve adults and children together, go with regular Apples to Apples. Just make sure you get one of them. It’s really a fun game, easy to learn and doesn’t take forever to play. You’ll learn some things about each other, too, like who thinks the chicken dance is refined.

When you get it, be sure to come back and tell me what you think!

PS
Check this out! You can print your own cards with family members names or whatever! I’m SO doing this, but don’t tell, I want it to be a surprise.

I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with them, I just haven’t ever felt moved to make one – until this year. This year there’s something I want, something I’m willing to work at for a whole year. It has nothing to do with weight, or cleaning, or eliminating a bad habit, or reading the Bible all the way through, or posting on this blog every single day.

November and December are crazy-hectic around here. They are for everyone, I know.  But we’ve got more than the usual holiday parties to deal with. We have a lot of family nearby  – parents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins… I’m not complaining. I wouldn’t change it for anything, not even the chance to spend the whole 2 months in Hawaii. (Well, ok, maybe just once, but not every year.) If it was up to me we’d have ALL of our family members living close by. It is hard, though, to find time for everyone, especially around the holidays. We often find ourselves trying to split our time between my mom’s family, my dad’s family and my in-laws. I remember one thanksgiving that we didn’t eat at all. We visited one side of the family in the morning, left the next one when they started to eat and arrived at the last destination just as they were finishing putting everything away.

On top of the normal Thanksgiving/Christmas gatherings we have no less than 10 birthdays in November and December. There are usually at least 2 soccer tournaments (that means 3 or 4 games in a single weekend) and at least one game the rest of the weekends. Add shopping, wrapping and baking to my regular schedule and you might understand why I have moments when I hate this time of year.

It’s exaggerated in November and December, but I do feel overwhelmed and tired almost all of the time. Soccer is an all year thing around here, and just the everyday obligations leave me feeling like I can’t keep up with everything. I don’t enjoy time with my friends and family very often because I’m either too busy or too tired to enjoy it.

That’s what I want to change.

I want to make time to hang out with my kids – they’re getting older and won’t necessarily be living here much longer. I need to take advantage of having them handy while I can.

I want to get together with my extended family more often. We’re so lucky to have most of them close by but we still don’t see some of them more than once a year. Again, I want to do more of this while I can still boss my kids around so that they’ll know and appreciate their family later.

I want to cultivate closer friendships. We have a lot of acquaintances that we like and enjoy spending time with but it doesn’t grow much beyond that because (say it with me) I’m to busy/tired for more.

I want to schedule some alone time with my husband. It’s so easy to live in the same house (and spend every night sitting next to each other on the couch watching TV/surfing the internet) and still wake up one day not knowing each other anymore. I don’t want that to happen to us.

Wow, that’s a lot of wants and I’m feeling a little overwhelmed just thinking about it. But you know what? I spent most of the day today sitting in front of the computer doing a whole lot of nothing. I didn’t even get this posted until after 9 at night. I could have played a game of Clue with my daughter or gone out to lunch with a friend.

While I want to minimize the time I spend on everyday chores, cooking, cleaning, shopping…, what I really need to do is stop wasting time on other things that don’t add anything to my life. That’s going to be harder for me and not as fun. I don’t watch a lot of TV but I do love my internet. It’s like living at the library. I find all kinds of great ideas and learn lots of new things on here. As much as I enjoy that, it’s not important in the long run, not like people.

I don’t expect to be posting next year about how I’ve accomplished everything I talked about today, but I do expect to have eliminated some of the time wasters in my life and, just by making this a priority, I hope I will have spent more time focused on what’s important.