Games Night


This evening, we had friends round to play board games. Unfortunately, we’d been to a party in the afternoon and La Serpiente had gone loopy after eating a couple of blue M&Ms. (We put this down to a reaction to sugar, or colourings, or something, and if she ate sweets more often, maybe she’d be inured to their effects. But then she’d be eating sweets more often…)

Still, after going loopy for a while, she went to sleep surprisingly easily (we read three books and then I drew her pictures of puppies and turtles as she requested, until she pulled her stuffed toys over her face and went to sleep). I ducked out to purchase cheese and salty nibbles, and got home just before our guests arrived.

We played Blokus for an hour. Blokus is like competitive Tetris for four people, but designed to be more aggravating, so it’s always a victory when it doesn’t end in a punch up.

We were part of the way into a game of Carcassone, a German game about building castles and roads, when La Serpiente woke up screaming. I went in to see her first, but she was daddy-inconsolable, and after another five minutes of screaming I had to hand her over to my wife. I went back to the games table and drank gin, and La Serpiente settled down.

And then kicked off about 45 minutes later, this time calling for me. She murmured something indistinctly when I went into her room, then drank some water and fell back to sleep.

From this we may conclude that the physical proximity of board games gives my eldest nightmares, and she is at least democratic when it comes to asking for emotional support from her parents. Since we couldn’t figure out what on earth the nightmare (if it was a nightmare, and not just the come-down from all those sweets) there wasn’t much else we could do for her apart from provide her with hugs and soft toys. I do worry that the nightmare was about a bear with a glowing red belly, or a honey-coloured puppy with a round gut and big floppy ears, in which case all our attempts to console her were making things worse, but she’s gone back to sleep (twice) which implies we weren’t aggravating the night terrors. I hope.

We considered playing Cards Against Humanity, but that would have been too much for the poor little thing. Or the gin-fuelled raucousness would certainly have woken her up – you have to think in terms of self-preservation…


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