Our New Games

A week or so ago we got a couple of new games to add to our collection. We have had a ton of fun with both of them. The first one is mancala, and papa taught Amirah how to strategize with this. Now she can legitimately beat me by planning out her moves. Eli likes to play too. He makes random moves that don't put many stones in his mancala pocket, but he sure enjoys playing!

Our other new game is Professor Noggin Life in the Ocean Card Game. The cards have questions on the back about the animal on the front. There's an easier set of questions and a harder set. You can roll a die to see which of the three questions (hard or easy) you're supposed to answer, or just shout out the number like we do. We play that if Amirah gets the answer right, she gets to keep the card. If she gets it wrong, I get to keep the card. On the easier questions, she gets most of the cards, but on the harder ones it's about 50/50. She is fact-crazy about animals of all kinds, so she loves to play this game.

And MY new toy is a steam juicer! We've borrowed one from a friend in the past, but this year with 130 (of 150) pounds of grapes still in the freezer and 10 pomegranates to juice (not to mention all the frozen summer fruit I haven't yet turned into jam, our freezers are currently way too full. So, in the interest of making room for next month's meat delivery, we got our own juicer. Tonight I did 7 quarts of grape juice and 7 pints of apricot jam (not in the juicer). It's a start!