Griffin loves going through the cabinet of board games in the basement. He dumps out the cards, plays with the dice, buzzes the buzzers, and wreaks havoc on the box corners. While he was doing this today, he started playing with a die from some game that had colors on each face. My gamer instincts kicked in and I thought, “We could actually PLAY a real game together… something with colors… he knows colors, and he kinda gets rolling the die.” So I came up with a few possibilities involving various collections of colored objects that matched the colors on the die. I wasn’t sure exactly what we would do, but something like “roll the die, then put the green thing into the box.” Not super sophisticated, but it would be a real game — with rolling dice. Yay! (Of course we already play lots of great games together — making faces, hide-and-seek, knocking towers of blocks down, etc. — but they are a different sort of game than the type with dice and moves.)

Griffin was thrilled that I was getting into it with him, but I think the logic of die-rolling or multiple steps of play still evades him. After a while, I could see the look on his face, “Daddy, why are you messing up my game???” So I let him get back to stomping on the boxes and folding up all the cranium cards. But soon, soon, he’ll be ready for the next step!