How did nobody ever think of this before?

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Cheese pencils. So simple! So brilliant!

No seriously, I’m not joking. Flavored cheese pencils that you can use with a simple pencil sharpener.

Looks like they have a few flavors, such as pesto and chili. Am I crazy, or is this brilliant? I wonder if you can actually write with the pencils. This could work for other things as well. I look forward to a time when all of our seasonings come in pencil format, rather than heavy glass jars which crash out of my cabinet and destroy any glasses waiting below.

They grow up so fast

/ Shane / 5 Comments

It feels like forever since I’ve had an update on Oliver, but it looks like it’s only been a month and half. Still, at this point a month and a half is still a significant portion of his life, so I guess it is a long time in baby terms!

He says so many words now we stopped counting them. He’s starting to put two words together more and more, although I can’t help but notice they’re usually in conjunction with food. His two most common two word sentences are “more X” and “X please”, where X is the name of a food item. He still resorts to a lot of pointing at something and saying please, which is not as good as using two words, but good enough in that it’s too adorable to ignore, so he gets what he’s pointing at.

He’s also referring to himself as “Ollie” sometimes, generally in conjunction to food (are you noticing a theme here?) If you’re eating something or even holding food or putting it on the table, he points to it and says, “Ollie! Ollie!” He’s just learned the word “me” in the past 24 hours or so, and understands that when he says it, it refers to himself. Hopefully that doesn’t replace “Ollie”, because hearing him say Ollie is so dang cute.

All of this control means he is being a little bit more selective in his food. Now that he knows he has some choice in the matter, he will pick some foods over others. Some days he won’t eat something that he ate perfectly well a different day. However, he still likes pretty much everything under the sun, so this hasn’t been too much of an issue. We are getting into spots where we have to hide something, especially cheese, because if he sees it, he won’t eat anything else.

The sleeping is still going okay. He still goes to sleep by himself and more or less sleeps through the night okay. He usually wakes up between 2 and 4 times a night, but you just have to say, “Oliver, go to sleep! It’s not time to get up yet!” and he goes right back to sleep, no problem. So, while this is a little annoying sometimes, it’s not really a problem, and certainly light years better than where we were! So I’m not complaining about this.

The big development is his love for going pee pee and poo poo in the potty. He loves it! We just offer it to him every once in awhile, and he’s going a couple of times a day, every day. Sometimes he even points to his bottom and says, “Poo poo!” and we put him on the potty and he goes! Or, if we set him on the potty, he usually strains and strains trying to get something out (pee pee is apparently as hard to get out as poo poo). So he obviously understands what he’s there to do, though he doesn’t see the point of *not* going in his diaper if he has to go. He’s a little young for potty training, but I have to think that the more times he goes in the potty, the easier it’s going to be when the time comes. The best rewards for a successfully potty break are 1) saying, “bye bye poo poo!” when he flushes, and 2) being able to use the toilet paper. Ooh man, he loves that one.

As Sara said the other day, “I think he’s even starting to have a neck!” What more could you ask for out of life than to have a neck?

Board Game: Acquire

/ Shane / 7 Comments

I grew up playing a little-known game called Acquire. I don’t run across many people outside of my family who are familiar with this game, but once people play it, they are hooked. It’s sort of like Monopoly meets Pit (except a lot more complicated than either).

Acquire is about buying stocks. You have a “hand” of tiles which allow you to start companies (hotels in the old school version, but I have the newer set, pictured below)(picture not taken by me), increase the size of companies, and merge companies into other companies. You buy stocks in these companies, and, depending on how the tiles fall, you can sell these stocks for money (hopefully for more than you paid), parlay stocks from a smaller company into stocks in a larger (and thus more expensive) company, or hold onto them until the end of the game, when they could be very valuable.

I know what you’re thinking: that doesn’t sound fun at all. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to convey the fun of the game in this simple blog post. However, if you’re really interested, you’re all invited to my house for a giant Acquire tournament! It is deceptively simple, as you soon find out when you’re forced to purchase a stock which might have implications 3 or 4 turns from now and you have to count your stocks, your opponents stocks, your money, your opponents money, and the number of stocks left for that company 5 or 6 times each, trying to predict how it will all end out.

The thing that makes Acquire the best board game ever, is that every game is different. For such a small board, you’d be amazed at all the combinations you can have. The board shapes up depending on how many people you have and how the tiles come up, and there are even multiple different ways for the game to end. Sometimes you have one big company that eats up all the others. Sometimes you have 2 or 3 even sized companies. Sometimes the guy with all the cash wins. Sometimes the girl with all the stocks wins.

The tricky part is that you can only buy 3 stocks per turn, but you have many different things going on at the same time. So the hard part is deciding what to buy. Do you get majority stockholder in this company, or do you get second place in these two? If you buy one stock is that going to be enough to hold on until the company merges, or do you need to buy two? But if you buy two, what else can’t you buy? Who seems to be doing better at the moment? Can I sabotage them somehow by giving majority to someone else who’s not doing as well?

It’s exhilarating, and it’s hard. When you get done you feel like you’ve really given your brain a workout. And if you can do that while having fun, what’s not to love?

Some people complain that the game takes too long. Honestly though, I think our average is around an hour and a half per game. To me, that’s not really much longer than any other board game you’re going to play. And it’s a lot more fun than any of those other games anyway.

Trust me on this one: Best. Board game. Ever.

You know the old saying…

/ Shane / 1 Comment

When life hands you computer hutches, make puppet show theaters.

Quote Monday is just designed that way

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Evie: “Oliver, I love you more than a penny.” – It may not sound like much, but if you know Evie, then you know this is about as high as praise gets.

Grandma Kathy: “Here, I can fix it.”
Evie: “Mama can do it, but you’re too old.”

Sara: “Ooh, you startled me!”
Evie, accusingly: “That’s because you know there are monsters and things like that in the world!”

Apparently she has been waiting to catch us in some inconsistency which would prove we were lying when we said there was no such thing as monsters.

::Me tickling Evie::
Evie: “Stop, I’m going to pee on you!”
Me: “Oh no!”
Evie: “For real, that’s just the way my body is designed!”