Good Tips for Blogging Smart

Bananas just re-posted an article about blogging safely with some good advice for young and old. If you have a blog, please take a look: http://www.absolutelybananas.com/2009/04/blogging-smart-how-to-protect-yourself-and-your-family-online.html

Spring Bloomers

Bright Eyes

Happy Birthday Anthony!

Anthony's sixth birthday was this week and we celebrated. All week long. What luck to have your birthday fall during Spring Break and to have Grandma come visit for the whole week!

Here's some pictures from the festivities on Sunday:

The candles.

The cake.

I can't believe I got Lego's!

Kiera helping out.

Our little man - grass stains, grins and mischief. Happy number six, Anthony!

Battleship Master

A couple of Saturdays ago Anthony wanted me to play Battleship with him. You remember Battleship, don't you? The game where you set up your five ships on your board and your opponent sets up his ships on his board and then without looking at each other's boards you take turns calling out grid coordinates in hopes of hitting and sinking all of your opponents ships. The grid coordinates get called out like, "A-4" or "D-6", and the response is usually a "Miss". But sometimes you get a "Hit!" and then, oh boy, you get to put a red peg on your screen and you start calling out the squares around it in hopes of finishing off your poor opponent's ship.

Anyway, I agreed to play with Anthony so we set up our ships and started. My strategy for this game was to let Anthony sink as many of my ships as possible (kids hate it when their ships get sunk), so I started calling out grids across the diagonal, not really caring whether I got a hit or not. "A-1", "Miss", "B-2", "Miss", "C-3", "Hit", Hmm. So I tried a couple more next to "C-3" and quickly sunk one of Anthony's ships. Anthony, on the other hand, was randomly scattering shots all across the board and not having much success. The game progressed and pretty soon I had sunk all but two of his ships. Then, still working my way across the diagonal, I hit three locations that were physically impossible with the ships that Anthony had left. What's going on? Are you sure I had a hit here? And here? And here? No? Anthony looked confused, so I called time out and slid his board over to take a look.

Turns out he was confused. Not one of my supposed 'hits' were in a location where he had ships - he was just arbitrarily interpreting my coordinates and deciding whether I'd hit a ship or not!

A quick explanation later and Anthony proclaimed, "Okay, now I know what to do!" And so we set it up again. This time I could tell that he was counting out the grids carefully before responding, and he sunk one of my ships before I got my first hit. Then I got the second and, knowing which way his ship was facing, quickly got the third and fourth. I expected the fifth and final hit to sink his aircraft carrier, the only ship in the game that's five units long, so I called out the last coordinate. "Hit!", Anthony called out, "And sink ... all of the ships!!!" Smiling, he held up all five ships stacked on top of each other.