Lloyd and I had dinner and fun at Rob and Cindy's place last weekend and during the course of the evening, 5-year old Brooklyn got out her Dora the Explorer Candyland game. (that's not a tattoo on her arm - she was at a birthday party earlier in the day and the face painter panted ladybugs climbing on leaves on her arm)...anyway, back to Candyland...
I hear this game has been around for many years. We had lots of games for our 7 kids when they were growing up (before video and computer games were invented!) but I don't recall ever having Candyland in the house. It's a remarkably simple game that pre-readers can easily play, and is surprisingly fun for adults too...although I'm sure most of you already know that. I've played it before with Kenzie and Sydney but Lloyd had never had the pleasure before. I'm willing to bet he'll be playing it again now that he's tried it.
The Dora twist was interesting. Luckily having spent a lot of time babysitting grandkids I'm familiar with the whole Dora family. Brooklyn was Boots, I was Dora and Lloyd was Diego, complete with pseudo latino accent and an agressive (cheating) attitude that the real Diego would never have.
Happily for Brooklyn, Boots got to the finish first, but only after Dora and Diego had to backtrack to broken cookies, spilled ice cream, or whatever other bad luck squares there were. Funny that Boots only landed on squares that moved her forward!
We really had to watch Diego carefully though because he didn't believe in following the winding path and kept trying to jump across to the next twist of the path and get ahead of everyone - kind of like Swiper would do if he were playing...SWIPER...NO SWIPING...
We had a fun time. I challenge any of you with a Candyland game in your homes, attics or basement storage, to dig them out and have a game or two with the young people in your lives.
