I knew I should have picked up that penny...

Earlier today as I was walking from the barge toward my car, I saw a penny on the ground in the street. Some remnant of my childhood in the back of my brain got excited and said, "Oooh! Find a penny, pick it up, and all the day you'll HAVE GOOD LUCK!" The crotchety old fart in me said to myself, "Self, that's just a silly stupid superstition. If you pick it up, then you're just going to have a dirty and useless penny cluttering up your pocket." The old fart won, and I kept walking without picking it up.

Fast forward to tonight. ES always gives us a hard time about practicing his spelling for school, so LW and I keep trying to come up with alternatives to just sitting there writing the spelling words out. We've let him type the words on the computer. We've let him spell the words with the letter magnets on the fridge. We've let him spell the words with letter cards. Tonight, I thought I'd try playing SCRABBLE with him. I was trying to think of a way to incorporate his spelling words into the game, but ended up just teaching him how to play and playing a game, and HE BEAT ME!!!

Call it beginners luck if you will. I call it BAD LUCK on MY part. I just couldn't get a break on the letters I was drawing. First I had this...

I just couldn't spell ANYTHING with it, so I sacrificed a turn in order to trade in the X, the Z, and two U's. What did I draw to take their place you ask? This is what I ended up with next:


So while I was making measly little three-letter words by adding an "IE" or an "OU" here and there and skipping a turn to trade out tiles, ES was making words like "RODENT" and hitting the double and triple word scores. Is that one of the standard entries in a baby book? First tooth... learned to walk... first word... beat father at Scrabble?

I think it's all just because I didn't pick up that darn penny in the street this afternoon.

Oh, and another thing! Recall from previous posts my explanation that we normally ask the boys what their favorite part about the day was before we say bedtime prayers. For someone who puts up such a fuss about going to school, tonight was the second out of four nights this week that ES has said his favorite thing about today was "school." His other favorite part about today was playing Scrabble though, so that lessened the ego-body-blow of losing to a six year old.