Word Hungry

Scrabble is our new family-favorite game.  We started with Scrabble Junior, with word suggestions on the side and on the board but now we play on a regular adult board without any vocabulary aid.  And the kids are doing really well!  We don't keep score, though, to keep down the competition and rivalry.

Continuing this wordplay, Mama has been making word scrambles for the kids' lunchboxes using their favorite books, movies, and toys (on the days I don't send jokes or poems).  Scrambles like "ehx ugsb" and "oornd" and "eneuq niolcar."  The kids love it.  Their favorite?  "ygfrofrind" (see below for answers)

Now, Mama is totally hooked on crossword puzzles, having discovered an iPad app (she uses Across Lite to find NYTimes archived puzzles).  She even had Sis helping her with clues today!  It's been fun doing the puzzles together, during quiet moments--and we get a good laugh over clues we can't decipher and excited when we figure out a trick (like today's puzzle that had a My Fair Lady theme and dropped the "h"s from  several words).  We're just learning the various crossword peculiarities.

Though I'm sure it's been there from the beginning (the beginning of Mama's and my relationship, even, and going back before that to our own academic-focused childhoods), it's more clear as the kids grow older that we're a word-based, I guess you'd say a verbal ("literary" is too pretentious sounding) family.  We're not a sporty family, neither really watching nor participating.  We're not an exceptionally musical family, liking to sing or listen but not having the skills (yet) to really play.  Instead, we read, we talk, and we write.   Sure it's not all we do (there's kung fu, crafting, baking, gardening, museums, history, traveling . . . but even most of those are relatively cerebral, as my pilates coach puts it), but we do manage to see and do things from that perspective more often.  Interested in basketball? Get a book from the library!  Like to draw dragons?  Let's make a dragon picture book with a story!  Enjoy birdwatching?  Keep a bird log!  Like the movie How to Train Your Dragon?  Read the book!  And then read a book about Norse mythology!  And we even got a book about the movie!

I mean, even this blog . . . apples don't fall far from the tree, of course, but it's become that much more obvious recently (now that they can read and write, though maybe that's the reason it's so prevalent now, as they learn and practice those skills).  And I'm not complaining--language arts skills will help them in school and with any kind of communications personally and professionally; plus there is enormous pleasure and inspiration that can be derived from reading, writing, and discussing.  It's how Mama and I operate.  But the challenge will be, as parents, to encourage that aspect of our family while also exploring other avenues, so that maybe someday sports or music won't be as much of a stretch for the kids as it is for me.

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(hex bugs, Droon, Queen Clarion, and Gryffindor!)