For Christmas this year we bought a bunch of board games for the kids. They LOVE board games. I bought them Chutes and Ladders as I had fond memories playing this game over and over with my mother. The perfect game for preschoolers right? No reading, some basic counting and familiarity with numbers, a few moral lessons thrown in. Harmless, right? Who in the Hell created this game. When the kids ask to play this game I try to persuade them to play Risk or Monopoly instead because we could play both of them in the amount of time it takes to play one game of Chutes and Ladders. At least with both of those games you can see the end coming. Not Chutes and Ladders, the end is nowhere in sight, not even predictable. Just when you think you might be winning, you land on one of those damn slides, and you are back down. The long ladder in the middle of the board is just false hope. Get lucky enough to catch that ladder and you will eventually slide back down again and again. It didn't take long for Isaak to get tired of playing and eventually Jacie was getting sick of making it to the top row only to slide back down three or four rows. I have this to say about Chutes and ladders... It entices you to cheat.. It provokes you to cheat.. I would go far enough to say that it teaches you to cheat.. Telling my kids that the spinner landed on 4 instead of 3.. "No it didn't dad. See a 3". But eventually Jacie felt the spirit of what I was trying to do and finally won the game..
If your mom or dad ever played Chutes and Ladders with you.. Please, I implore you... Call them and tell them that you appreciate all they have done for you especially the time they spent pretending to enjoy Chutes and Ladders.
This is the dream I had that night. "Dad, can we please play Chutes and Ladders"?
2 comments:
That was a funny post!
with some of our extra time in Italy Lynn and I had fun going back and reading all the old posts we hadn't read. (Now that we know how to do it). We laughed so hard at this one. We don't have chutes and ladders and we won't plan on buying it! I do have a vague memory of playing it at your moms house when the kids were little. I guess that is why I never bought it.
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