Cráneo Campo de Juegos (más o menos)

It cannot be said with any degree of accuracy that Daniel enjoys board games. Despite sitting through long games of Axis and Allies in college, he can wander off completely during a game of Trivial Pursuit. My family however always enjoyed playing games together. So I have been introducing Joaquin to them recently. He really enjoys them despite a keen lack of competition. I've been helped in this endeavor by Daniel's aunt Erika who sent Joaquin several child-friendly games for his birthday. And really who can resist quality time with this cutie? Not Daniel that's for sure. Our favorite is Cranium Playground, a game I sincerely recommend. We had a great time playing with Jonah over Christmas break and it has been well loved since. We even force adult guest to play it! Our latest victim was Johanna who came over because we made yummy food and then was suckered in. She's the girl imitating Joaquin's tongue action while drawing. (He's not a natural draw-er by any means, so drawing takes a lot of

concentration which means a lot of tongue action.) The game could honestly be considered educational since the kids have to count, draw, identify letters, and dance. Joaquin's favorite, and best, category is the letter category. You spin a wheel, call out the name of the letter revealed and then make it with your body. He's really creative about making letters with his arms and legs. The letter in this picture is K, see it? The last picture in this set is him dancing. Looks like he's really grooving, huh? Other than fun family shenanigans, I have nothing else to fill up this blog, so here's a few moments from the mind of Joaquin. 1. He has a CD with songs in french, one being "Alouette". He kept telling me how he wanted to know the story of the song and I told him I couldn't understand it since it was in french. He wanted to know where people who spoke french lived and I told him France (didn't add the others, why make it complicated?). So he decided that after we move to Colorado we should move to France to learn french to understand the song. There's also the Kookaburra song on the CD. Once he learned that the Kookaburra was a bird that lived in Australia he added Australia to the list of future homes. Apparently seeing the Kookaburras in pictures Mommy looked up online was not good enough. (Incidentally we talked about all the other animals in Australia and I started wondering, why do they all start with K? Kookaburra, Koala, Kangaroo....hmmmm.)

2. At storytime he learned about floatplanes and how they land on water. The librarian told him they use them often in Alaska because they have a lot of lakes there. Then yesterday we were driving home and were nearly knocked off the road by a giant tumbleweed. Joaquin thought that it must have been a tree when it was still a plant. I told him no, but that it was big for a tumbleweed so it must have grown someplace with a lot of water to get that big. He tells me, "That tumbleweed must have grown in Alaska!". Good logic for a little guy! I told him that he was right, Alaska did have a lot of water but that was too far for a tumbleweed to tumble and it had probably grown near someone's garden that they were watering. He thought that seemed reasonable. :)