Family Game Night

One side effect of Christmas that I'd forgotten about is the way major gift holidays cause Nicholas to take a developmental leap forward. That sounds silly so let me explain. At Christmas and his birthday Nicholas gets a bunch of toys that either meet him where he is or are things we and others anticipate him wanting or being ready for soon. These replace a bunch of toys that he has outgrown or have ceased to interest or challenge him. For example, in making room for his new Christmas toys I packed away a bunch of toys he got at 9-12 months that he was still enjoying as of our move this summer but that look so incredibly infantile when compared to his new toys. And he quickly rises to the new challenges presented by his new toys.

With his current batch of new toys this growth falls into two big categories:
imagination

From 2011 December

and playing games.

From 2011 December

He had played Candyland before, but with no concept of the object of the game or winning. He would move his piece to a color that matched the card he pulled and sometimes go in the right direction, but that was it. Fast forward 3 weeks and a bunch of new games for Christmas and tonight we had a family game night playing multiple games with (close to) real rules and with good sportsmanship.

His favorite new game is Preschool Uno (which he calls the "barn game" because it involves pushing animals into a barn to discard) and over the past 3 days he had progressed from just matching animals and colors to understanding the objective of getting rid of all of your pieces to wanting to win and getting upset when he lost to being willing to take turns on who goes first to accepting that you only win sometimes. I'm actually thinking that it might be time already to add in the wild cards and "draw two" skunks that I took out initially. Hiding pieces and saying "uno" may wait a little longer, though.

We have also played Memory some and I don't know why I'm surprised that he is so good at it, but I am. His strategy is severely lacking (he always picks for his first pick something he knows even if he has no idea where the other one is), but he remembers where he has seen an object before better than I do.

I'm curious to test my theory by pulling out Candyland tomorrow. I want to see if I'm right that the new games have pushed him to grasp the concept of game playing more thoroughly or if he has just been learning these specific games.