This week, I discovered that something I would really like to do is go to a Research and Development meeting for a board game company. I would listen to what these sadistic geniuses are coming up with, hear what motivates them, admire the creative process, and then, just as they are being super, duper productive, I would yell out a powerful scream and flip the meeting table over, like a deranged poker player who just lost all of their chips.

Why is this? Well, Spicy Girl just got not one, not two, but three board games for her most recent birthday, and frankly I’ve been pushed to the edge.

Ok, I need to say this up front. My family didn’t play games. Ever. We owned three games: Othello, Connect Four and Checkers. We would play them only when forced to turn the TV off. Soon after the inevitable argument/screaming match would break out between me and my sister and we would be told to “Put the [expletive] game away and turn on the [expletive] TV.”

Just as we had hoped, more time for Brady Bunch reruns!

So, when Spicy Girl just came through her birthday with these newest acquisitions, I was nervous. Very… very … nervous. I feared that I was going to be seen as the fraud that I know I am. I would be found out as the woman who cannot formulate the advanced knowledge in her pea-brain to make her way out of the cardboard maze without the aid of instructions that are constantly clutched in hand. And even then, as someone who can’t concentrate on them well enough to not make game derailing mistakes.

To my defense, I find it very distracting to read, absorb and implement the instructions of Chutes and Ladders while Spicy Girl is laying on the dining room table reaching out for game pieces and screaming, “OK, Mom. Let’s go this way, Mom. I want to be the red one, Mom. You be the, the, the, green guy, Mom. Spin the wheel, Mom. No, Mom. This way, Mom. Mom. Mom. Mom. Mom. Mom.”

You get the picture.

Maybe she will like the Brady Bunch as much as I did.