Spring Break - Day Three or Why I Hate Candyland

This was one of those days where I can’t possibly tell you what we did today. Mostly people just wandered about our house making messes while I cleaned up messes that had been made previously. Here’s what I do know:
1. Xavier has had the same shirt on since he went to bed Sunday night. I realized this today and while I played with the idea of making him take a bath and change his whole wardrobe, I think it will be far more interesting to wait and see if anyone else notices this. To understand why this is legitimately interesting I have to point out that I am only one of three adults who sees this kid on a daily basis (his father and my mother both have seen him on several occasions since he put the shirt on).
2. I hate Candyland. Growing up I loved Candyland. If you ask any adult without children, they will list Candyland as one of the top games of their childhood. Think about it: it takes place in an enchanted forest decorated with delicious treats, you get to move your little gingerbread self on a candy-coated path through that forest, and it is the only game that really speaks to the fantasy of drifting around in an ice-cream sea. And the only requirement for getting to play in that enchanted forest was, well there was no requirement. Candyland requires no skill whatsoever (by "skill" I mean basic ability). Wikipedia suggests that Candyland requires color recognition but all that really means is that blind people might experience a slight challenge playing Candyland. I mean you don’t have to be able to name the colors to play, all you have to do is match the square on your card to the square on the path. There’s no reading, no counting, no thinking. There’s NOTHING in this game except moving a little gingerbread man along and thinking about candy. Except if you are one of my kids. Then playing Candyland involves a whole bunch of scheming and lying and mistrust. In general, playing Candyland is an opportunity to showcase your worst self. Details of our most recent Candyland game should be sufficient to illustrate this point:
It was Xavier’s idea to play Candyland yesterday and because I couldn’t really come up with any good reasons why we shouldn’t play - I agreed. I insisted that both his sisters play with us and after twenty minutes of arguing over colors (just so you know, I ended up with green which was in fact my LAST choice) and seating arrangements, we got down to it. Right out of the gate there was trouble. Polly knocked over the deck of cards and we had to wait five minutes while a VERY concerned Xavier reassembled the deck. After that, Xavier started things off by drawing an orange card. What luck! This put him squarely on Rainbow Pass and saved him quite a bit of trouble. Had it been someone else’s child, I definitely would have suspected some funny business. Then I started noticing that both kids were experiencing quite a run of double square draws. At that point I had some suspicions but no actual proof that there was some serious cheating going on in Candyland. And besides I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do even if I did have the proof. I mean calling the kids out on cheating would mean that we would all be there much longer than I wanted to be and they were actually getting along quite well (even if it was only because they both were kicking my green ass). So I had decided on turning a blind eye to the situation until Xavier drew the Gramma Nutt card. At the time, he was two thirds of the way to King Kandy’s Kastle and this was a major setback indeed. The kid flipped. And that is when I improvised and came up with one of the best add-on board game rules ever. I told Xavier he could either go back to Gramma Nutt’s cottage (which I pointed out was made of peanut brittle and very possibly deliciously salty) or he could miss four turns. He contemplated his choices for about fifteen seconds and went back to Gramma Nutt’s. Before long, he had another bad draw and that is when the real (and by real I mean downright obvious) cheating began. Pretty soon the kid refused to even acknowledge what card he had actually drawn. When it was his turn to move he would sometimes stop on the color that he drew, but that didn’t mean it was the next square of that color. His sister caught on and begin to get furious. And I was forced into action. See we actually have a family motto and the third part of the motto is "no cheating", so me choosing to ignore the cheating was simply intolerable from a parenting perspective. I called him on it, and reminded him of the rules, and threatened to throw him out of the game and made him miss a turn or two. Eventually the game ended with everyone celebrating with King Kandy, but I didn’t feel any better for having taught him a lesson. I just felt tired and disappointed and maybe just a little bit pissed off that I played it straight and still came in dead last (that’s right, a 21 month old with a "weyow" guy beat me).