We are home from three festive days of Christmastide at Colonial Williamsburg, and ready to ring in the New Year!
SNACKS
This year I made Artichoke Dip to add to our shrimp cocktail, cheese and crackers, and tamales.
Dessert Bar
MOVIE
While eating, we watched Bachelor Mother, starring Ginger Rogers and David Niven and Donald Duck in New York City on New Years’ Eve!
It’s a funny story of how they accept a baby that needs a family.
WINNER PUTS THEIR NAME IN THE BOX LID
Then game night began! The winner puts their name in the box lid, next to the year, and chooses the next game.
SWISH
This is Swish, a Spatial IQ game that I found for my daughter to work on her vision therapy in a fun way.
The doctor who owns the vision therapy office my daughter attends, sent an e-mail of a list of games and activities categorized for each skill they develop, to consider for Christmas gifts.
I bought many things on the list, then found this, which said (spatial IQ on the box).
I told my daughter she should take this one in to show her therapist, in case it’s new to them.
My son won this game, but we were all competitive!
This is very similar to many skills my daughter has been working on and she did quite well, far better than she would have two months ago when we started on spatial reasoning skills!
It was great to see how well she made matches.
GEOBEE
My son chose an old favorite that we haven’t played in years, Geobee from National Geographic, a favorite of my daughter’s!
We played a higher-level version this year.
My daughter has always known the most about geography, but sadly she got all the bad rolls of the dice which took away points.
She knew far more than my son about specifics about Africa, but he uses logic instead of knowledge to answer his questions and accumulate points, causing me to shake my head in amazement the entire game.
It was so hilarious listening to my daughter read the questions in a comedic way, that I wish I had videotaped it, but that would have lost the moment.
I won but only because of the roll of the dice.
The winner of this game should have been my daughter.
My daughter brought up her gel pen collection so we could choose pretty colors to sign our names in the box lids when we won!
SCRABBLE
Since I won the last game, I chose to play Scrabble next, which we play with unique rules as we try to use every tile for the puzzle.
Winning again, I chose Blokus.
BLOKUS
The kids have given each colored tile a nickname:
Red tiles = (guest) General Cornwallis
Green tiles = (daughter) Lt. Col. Banastre Tarleton
Blue tiles = (son) General Washington
Yellow tiles = (me) Lafayette 😉
Winning the game shortly after midnight, my son wanted to play a quick game of Risk.
RISK
My son finally conquered the world and we went to bed tired, but happy from a fun day.
My son can’t wait to conquer us in more games later in the day!
VISION THERAPY PROGRESS FOR MY DAUGHTER
Most exiting though, is that for the first time ever, my daughter was highly competitive with every game.
This has everything to do with her eye tracking difficulties, which detracts from higher-level thinking.
We’ve been working hard on visual tracking, spatial reasoning, and higher-level thinking, which has paid off.
I don’t think she’s 100% yet but I’d say 70-80%!
That’s a huge improvement in 6 months of vision therapy!
For more photos, check my Flickr set.
COMMENTS FROM MY OLD BLOG
Dawn – January 1, 2014 at 2:16PM – That is such a wonderful accomplishment for your daughter and family this year. I would love to hear the list of games for vision therapy. Would you please share it with us? That is a major goal of ours this year as well. What is the name of the game in the picture you used for vision?
Blessings, Dawn
lahbluebonnet – January 1, 2014 at 3:36PM – I have no idea if the doctor’s list is copyrighted. I should check. I can at least share what we have and go into a bit more detail across the board for all the benefits. The game above is Swish! I amended the post and added that info, since I forgot.
Blokus and Jenga were on the list too, which we already had. I have lots of games and activities to showcase.
Laurie
Dawn – January 2, 2014 at 8:01 AM -Thank you so much. We have Blokus and love it. If you find out that the list isn’t copyrighted or can share more…I am all ears. We have found Q-bitz to be a great vision game.
Blessings, Dawn
lahbluebonnet – January 2, 2014 at 8:41 AM – Oh yes, Qbitz was on the list. I got that one too. We played it on Christmas Day! My son won that! My daughter did great with it! I did the worst! That is hard!
Laurie
