The first day of Thanksgiving break

Here's how Nephi and the boys spent pretty much the entire first day of Thanksgiving break. Well, after a little early morning playing in the snow while Nephi hung the Christmas lights on our roof. Nephi and the three boys played Cities and Knights of Catan for about seven hours. Yes, even Isaac, who seemed to have a better-than-you'd-expect-for-a-three-year-old grasp of what was going on and really enjoyed feeding his knights and building roads. Joseph and Caleb were totally into it, with good strategies and goals. If you're not familiar with the game, it's quite a complex strategy game. This is close to nirvana for Nephi. He loves strategy games, but they have lots of small pieces and take a long time to play which tend to make them incompatible with little kids. So to discover that one's kids are suddenly old enough to play such games with, and that they love them maybe even more than you, is a happy discovery indeed. (I must also add that for nearly the entire time, they listened on repeat to the soundtrack of Spirit Stallion of the Cimmaron which Nephi very unwisely downloaded one day at the request of Joseph. It mostly consists of Bryan Adams ballads and pump-you-up sorts of songs. The boys really, really like it, and I'll leave it at that.)