Quick! Only 53 days until Joey's birthday!

Well, it's Friday night again, and I'm happy to say that Ella earned herself another grownup movie.  She told me a little about the day: she had fifteen full conversations, she thinks. And at one point during the day she wrote two two full pages, in cursive, in German, about otters. Kind of awesome.

We spent the afternoon swimming at the pool, before cozying up for the evening. But the morning I spent with Joey, playing countless games of Candyland.  After about the eighth round, my mind started wandering to how fun it would be to have a life-sized board for the kids to play with. And then I realized that the kids would have a total field day putting together a project like that.

I ran the idea past Ella and Alex when they got home from school, and their faces just shone with excitement as they started brainstorming: could we make costumes? Could we make prizes out of clay? Could we earn real candy if we land on the special squares? Should we make the spaces out of cardboard? Could the castle in Ella's room be the end of the game?

Could we make it as a present for Joey, and make playing the game his birthday party and birthday present?

Yes, of course, yes!

So they were off. Alex settled down to coloring little cutouts of candy, while Ella decorated vests made out of paper bags, turning them into gingerbread-man costumes. And under their guidance, I sliced up some of the jillion cardboard boxes in our basement. I figured, if nothing else, this project would make cardboard recycling a whole lot easier when it comes time to move away.

So far we have a stack of about fifty squares for the kids to hop along, although Ella wants to make over a hundred, so that the path can be exactly the same as that of the board game. She doesn't want to tamper with the gameplay, of a game so tested and true.

A lot of this work was done while watching Back to the Future, which Ella chose for the evening. I think I was just about exactly her age when I saw the movie for the first time, in the theater.   I haven't seen it on a long time, and I'm sure I enjoyed it more than the kids. Although Ella was bouncing around in excitement for the entire second half of the movie, from the beginning of the Enchantment Under the Sea dance onward.

And she got her first lesson in what is and isn't acceptable language.  After the scene at the clock tower, where Doc Brown was asking "Damn, where's that kid?!"  Ella piped up, exquisitely happy: "This whole damn thing is so exciting!"