Taking a break from my posts about travel & living in Singapore, I have a confession to make. The Girl is addicted. Hopelessly & completely addicted to playing games. Card games to be exact. I blame my friend Gaby who brought the games to Thailand & got her hooked.
Families have game nights once a week. It's game night EVERY night chez nous. After dinner, she would lug her card games to my room & we would play several hands before it's time for bed. It has become our nightly routine.
Kids are extremely competitive & she gets upset when she doesn't win. But I have a rule & that is I don't try to let her win. She has to learn how to lose graciously & only by losing, will she learn how to play better. As a result, she has gotten so good at some games that she consistently beats her mum.
All the card games I'm about to introduce are from a French company called Djeco, who by the way makes great games & art kits. The cards are all beautifully designed & very good quality. I expect the ones we have to last us a long time, despite our constant abuse. They are perfect to bring along when travelling. We enjoy them so much I fully intend to collect their entire range of card games. In Singapore, you can buy them from The Better Toy Store.
The first one of the lot that I got is the classic Happy Family that we all know & love. Djeco does it with cute animal characters depicting various occupations - dog doctors, sheep hairdressers, cat fishmongers etc. She never seem to tire of this.
The next one is called Zabifuzz. A game that requires quick reflexes & good eye. The aim of the game is to be the first to get rid of all your cards. In a centre pile, each player has to throw down their cards in the right order - hat, T-shirt, underpants, pants, socks & shoes from their own stack of cards. In the beginning I had to prompt her what comes next but now she needs no help & consistently beats me. We get very noisy when playing this. Oh & we use the same set of cards to play snap. Even noisier.
This I bought 3 days ago so she is still getting the hang of. I like this because unlike the previous one which is pure action, this requires a strategy. There is a food chain of animals from the strongest to the weakest - from the lion to the crab - clearly depicted in a series of cards which are set aside as reference. Each player will draw one card from their pile & throws down simultaneously with the other player. The one with the stronger animal in the *fight* will win the cards. This goes on until all the cards are thrown down. Whoever has the most cards win.
This seemed like a good idea when I bought it. Cards that glow in the dark. The objective being to collect all the parts to form a full skeleton. Not unlike Happy Family but because you only have 2 types of skeletons to assemble, it's not very challenging. After playing a couple of nights, it was been left sitting in a corner. Seems a pity to let this go to waste. I might have to get creative & come up with another use for these cards.
So if you don't see me updating my blog, you'll know that I'm busy playing cards with my daughter.
I'm a sentimental sort of gal & a sucker for anything nostalgic. It's not a case of "in the good old days or when I was your age" sort of thing although I'm now old enough to say that. Even when I was in my twenties, I'd always been drawn to retro stuff.
I love these old style pastries. The peanut biscuits, the *wife cakes*, the sweet rice cakes (not to be confused with the Japanese crackers). You don't find these just any where - most definitely not at Bread Talk (although I'm a big fan) nor your Western style pâtisseries. 
