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Card games are also popular for kids to play in America. I think every kid has played Old Maid, Memory, and Go Fish at least. They're very simple games, but kids really enjoy them!



When I play these games with my kids I'm a little bored But it's important for them to have fun doing things they enjoy with me too.

Did you like these kinds of card games when you were young?
  

Another popular American board game for children is called Mouse Trap. In the game, you build pieces one-by-one to make a very complicated mousetrap. The mousetrap ends up being a kind of "Rube Goldberg machine." (If you don't know what that is, Google defines it as "a complex machine that performs a simple task in an indirect and complicated way, named after cartoonist and inventor Rube Goldberg.") Then you try to catch your friends' mice in the trap, while keeping your own mouse safe.



It's a very silly and fun game to play, and maybe it helps children learn some engineering or physics?
Have you played this game before?  

Here's another commonplace American childhood board game, Hi Ho Cherry-O. In the game, you want to be the first person to pick all the cherries from your tree. When you spin the spinner, you might land on a number. Then you can pick that many cherries from your tree. But sometimes when you spin the spinner, you might land on an animal. The animals take cherries from your basket, and so you have to put a certain number of cherries back on your tree. Or you might land on the spilled bucket! If you do, you have to put all of your cherries back on the tree!



This game was pretty fun to play when I was a kid, but it seemed to take a really long time to play!

Many of the board games I've mentioned on this blog come in older and/or updated versions. I usually post pictures of how the board looked when I was a kid, but some other people might remember the game as looking a little different!  

Another popular board game for American children is the board game Trouble. It's very much like the board game Sorry, where if you land on someone else's piece, their piece has to go back to the start. But the best part of the game is the bubble in the middle of the board. There's a dice in the middle of the bubble, and when you press the bubble down, it pops back up and makes the dice roll.



When I was a kid, I thought the gameplay for Trouble was boring, but played it anyway because I really liked pushing the bubble!  

Here's a board game that I'm sure many American girls have played, but maybe not so many of the boys. It's called Pretty Pretty Princess. In the game, you travel around a board with pictures of jewelry. When you land on a place with a picture of a piece of jewelry, you can take that piece from the jewel box in the middle of the board. Your goal is to collect all the pieces of jewelry in your color, as well as the crown. There's only one crown, so whoever lands on the space with the crown steals it from whoever had the crown before! There's also one black ring. If you have the black ring, you can't win until you get rid of it. When you win, you look at the mirror on the jewel box lid and announce that you are the pretty pretty princess!



It's not a very educational game. But as a little girl, it's very fun! Have you ever played something like this before?  

Another popular childhood American board game is the game Chutes and Ladders. On the board, there are children who make good choices and bad choices, such as rescuing a cat stuck in a tree, or reading a comic book instead of studying. If you land on a space that has a child making a good choice, you go up the ladder to the picture of the child's good outcome from making that good choice. If you land on a space that has a child making a bad choice, you go down the slide to the picture of the child's bad outcome from making that bad choice. Each game board square is marked with a number, so it's a good game to teach children how to count to 100. The first person to reach square number 100 wins.



There's also a version of this game called "Snakes and Ladders." It's the same game, only it has snakes instead of slides. I think it doesn't really make sense that way...  

Okay, I'm finally done talking about Candyland. Another game that probably most Americans have played as a child is the board game Operation. You have to try to remove some organs from some poor suffering guy while causing him as little pain as possible. If your tweezers touch the side of the hole, the man's nose glows red and a buzzer sounds! It's a little scary playing it as a child, but also fun. It's a good game to help develop fine motor coordination.



Many of the organs from the man are based on idioms, puns, or phrases in English such as "funny bone", "spare ribs", and "butterflies in your stomach."

Have you ever played this game before?
  

Speaking of the board game Candyland, have you ever tried eating the cereal called Lucky Charms? The American holiday St. Patrick's Day was three days ago, and Lucky Charms cereal always reminds me of St. Patrick's Day. You might wonder what a board game has to do with cereal. Well a few years ago, Lucky Charms made their own version of Candyland!



I've never played it, but it looks like fun. I love all the cartoon mascots for different products, and so this kind of thing makes me happy.
  

As I mentioned last week, the board game Candyland has many different versions. The gameplay is more or less the same for each version, but the board looks different.

The game was first made in the late 1940s, and it seems like ever since it was made, the publishers come out with a new board design every couple of years.

It's fun to do a Google search and look at all the game board designs. Some designs are very similar, and you have to play a game of "find the differences" to figure out what was changed. But some designs are very different! There are also designs that feature popular cartoon characters.

Here is one of the earliest designs and one of the more recent designs:



Which design do you like the best?  

I thought it might be fun to introduce some board games that are very traditional to childhood in America. I feel like if you asked most Americans, they would tell you that they definitely played at least most of these when they were a kid. How many of these did you know about already?

So one of my favorite childhood board games was Candyland. This is a very simple game where you draw a card with a color on it, and then move to the next space on the board that has that color. I really loved the characters on the game board, and the box even had a story about all the characters!

The game Candyland has many, many different versions. This was how the board looked when I was a kid:


Have you ever played version of Candyland before? I know we have it at at least one of the Gem schools!  

Here's yet another fun TV special made by Rankin/Bass! It's called Jack Frost, after the main character. A long time ago in America, when you saw frost on your window on a winter morning, people would say that a spirit named Jack Frost put it there. This movie is about that spirit.



In this movie, Jack Frost has fallen in love with a human girl. He wants to become a human too, so that he can be with her. Father Winter says he can try being a human, but he has some rules. Jack Frost must get a house, a horse, a bag of gold, and a wife by the first day of spring. If he doesn't, he'll become a spirit again. But it's very difficult for Jack Frost to get these things. The village where the girl lives is ruled by an evil king who keeps everyone very poor. Will Jack be able to defeat the bad king and get everything he needs by the first day of spring?

This movie mentions Christmas (in December) and Groundhog Day (in February), so it's a nice movie to watch for any time in winter! Have you ever seen this one?  

Here's another movie made by Rankin/Bass. This movie has Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. He's usually a Christmas character, but in this movie, he has to help save the New Year.



Every year, a new baby New Year is born. But this year's baby New Year has really big ears! Everyone laughs at him, so he runs away. Nobody can find where he went! Also, there's a big, evil vulture who is also trying to find the baby New Year. He wants to kidnap the baby so he can stop time and live forever. Santa asks Rudolph to help save the New Year, and so Rudolph goes on many adventures to try to bring him back.

This movie is fun, and my kids love it. Have you ever seen this one before? I hope you have a very happy New Year!  

This was always one of my very favorite Christmas movies to watch when I was a kid! Have you ever heard the Christmas carol, "Frosty the Snowman"? This movie is based off of that carol. It's a really cute movie!



In the movie, a girl named Karen and her friends make a snowman. There's a bad magician who doesn't want his magician's hat anymore, so they put the hat on the snowman. But when they do, the snowman comes to life! The children name him Frosty. They have lots of fun playing with him! But there are several problems. The weather is becoming a little warmer, so Frosty is afraid he will melt. Also, when the bad magician sees that his hat is magic, he wants to have his hat back! But if Frosty doesn't have the hat, he won't be alive anymore. How will Karen and the other children save Frosty? Santa might have to help them out a little!

This is another movie made by Rankin/Bass! Have you seen it?  

Every year, there are SO MANY Christmas movies and Christmas "specials" that we watch with our kids. My husband and I grew up watching many of these movies every Christmas ourselves, so we have fond memories watching these when we were kids. Not all of them are cinematic masterpieces, but they are very enjoyable to watch anyway.

One of my favorites is called A Year Without a Santa Claus. In the movie, Santa has a cold and feels depressed. He thinks that nobody really believes in him anymore anyway, so he decides that he's not going to go deliver presents this year. Mrs. Claus gets some of the elves to help raise Christmas spirit in a town in the south of the United States. They fly there on a reindeer, but the reindeer gets mistaken for a stray dog and put in the pound. They also need to get it to snow there, but since the United States south is too hot to get much snow, they have to convince the two spirits of hot and cold to get along and let it snow there. You'll have to watch the movie to find out if they're successful! I won't spoil the ending for you if Santa really doesn't deliver presents that year or not.



This movie was made by Rankin/Bass Productions. They made many of our other favorite Christmas movies too! Have you ever seen any of their movies?  

I love watching the rice stalks blowing in the breeze, but I'm glad that the rice has been harvested now. I really love eating rice, so I hope we won't have any more rice shortages!



Now that the rice stalks have been cut short, the little creatures living in the rice fields don't have anywhere to hide. The birds have been having a great time gobbling them up!

I thought this crane by my house made a pretty picture.  

Happy American Thanksgiving! This year, as always, I'm thankful that my husband is such an amazing cook. He loves cooking, and he makes us yummy dinners every day!



This is a picture of him working on our Thanksgiving feast a few years ago. We had turkey, ham, potatoes, sweet potato casserole, green beans, rolls, and cranberry sauce for dinner, all made by him! I'm always the one who makes the desserts, so I made a few different types of pie for dessert that year.

I hope you have a great day with many things to be thankful for!  

There is a smartphone app called Neko Atsume that came out a long time ago. I used to play it, and it was really fun. You put out food for cats in your yard, and add things for cats to play with, like yarn balls, cardboard boxes, pet beds, and cat toys. When you come back later, some cats might have shown up! You can watch them playing in your yard with the things you left out for them, and you can take pictures of them. Sometimes special rare cats come if you put out certain items in your yard. If a cat visits often enough, sometimes they give you a gift! It's a very relaxing and cute game.

This past summer I was really excited to learn that they were making a sequel to Neko Atsume! It's called Neko Atsume 2. It finally came out this fall, and I've been having lots of fun playing it too! The cats are more animated in this game, and you can visit other people's yards. There are some new special cats as well!

Here is a picture of my yard:



In this game, there is a cute little dog who peeks into your yard sometimes. If you tap on him, he barks!

Have you played this game or the old one before? What do you think of them?  

When we went to CoCo's, it was right before Halloween, so they had a fun Halloween dessert on the menu!



It looked so cute! We had to try it.



It even looked mostly like the picture! It was pretty delicious.
Have you ever tried this dessert before?  

Recently we went to CoCo's Cafe in Mito. It was a lot different than the CoCo's type of restaurant we had been to before! We were very impressed by the menu. It seemed like they had some of every type of food possible! There was curry and rice, soup, steak, Caribbean jambalaya, hamburger steak, pasta, pizza, fish, shrimp and other seafood, salad, and even Mexican quesadillas! There were so many options, it took us a long time to decide what we wanted!

The restaurant also had robot servers! My kids always love seeing these whenever a restaurant has them.




  

When I was in college, one year some of my friends decided to do a group costume for Halloween. They decided to dress up as a deck of cards! It was really fun to see them all.





One of my friends, just to be funny, went as a "birthday card" instead of a "playing card."



Did you dress up for Halloween this year? What kind of costumes do you like?