Yes, folks, it's game night

A small glimpse, for your entertainment, of what family game night actually looks like at our house...

*It's Sara's night to choose the game, and, inexplicably, she pulls out Monopoly. She does not like games that require much sitting still and decision making. Especially Monopoly with SEVEN people. But she says excitedly, "I pick Monopoly!" We believe it has something to do with the enjoyment of lining up piles of money.

*I finish reading my Newsweek article while Eric passes out all the money and Levi sets up the cards. I consider this a great perk of being The Mom. The Mom is not in charge during game night. She has just cooked The Pizzas.

*Leah makes it exactly two rounds. She frowns deeply when we pull $200 from her stack for the income tax and frowns even more deeply after we tell her she can't roll the dice in a manner as dangerously as she did the first round. She tells me she wants to be on my team and that I can have all her money, then exits to go play "kids and dog". Jesse leaves one round later.

*The rules are, whoever has the most assets in one hour is declared the winner. Delaney immediately leans toward hoarding, and considers it beneficial when she ends up in jail twice. Levi refuses to believe that the game will actually eventually be over, and is torn between buying more properties and (strangely) asking to mortgage them to get more cash (what are we teaching him?). Eric can't roll higher than three all night unless he's landed on my electric company and has to pay me four times the roll. So, even though this never, ever happens, I get lots of doubles, buy everything I can, zoom around the board and end up winning.

*My first property purchase of the night, on my very first turn (I'm usually a conservative Monopoly player), brought this winning quote of the night from Levi: "Wow, $150, are you sure? That's a lot of money for a mom."