Blog Number 379

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.
We attended the annual Indiana Home School Convention this year in April (at least I think it was April, honestly it is not quite the highlight of my calendar year that it is to my wife).  Anyway, one way to kill time (err, one great thing about it) is to wander through the vendor booth section.  To you non-home schoolers out there, you just have no idea the number of choices out there.  I have attended a few of these things and I am still shocked each year.  One thing I remember seeing this year is many little card games.  Some taught history, some math, some grammar or phonics, etc.  Others were just cool little games (Uno had to start small like this I would think).  One game that we saw was called Manners for Mealtimes.  The basic idea (according to the box) was to teach your children (and maybe husbands) some manners (all while having fun presumably).  I treated this game about like I did all the others (as a means of killing a minute or two) but the wife must have also seen this game as it arrived at our house the other day as part of our fall curriculum order.  Upon reading the more detailed rules we discovered that there were 2 levels of the game.  You move on to level 2 after you have mastered level 1.  Everyone brings some of their own money to the table (preferably all the same denomination [we chose dimes]) and each time you are caught breaking one of the manner rules, you put a dime (or quarter if you prefer) in front of your plate.  At the end of the game, whoever has the least amount of money in front of their own plate, gets all the money in front of the other plates.  If there is a tie, you split the winnings up as fair as possible.  Some of the level 1 rules are...

• Place your napkin on your lap
• Use polite conversation
• Use your utensils properly
• Ask for food to be passed rather than reaching

Level 2 uses all the level 1 rules and adds a few...

• Sit properly using good posture
• Ladies are seated first, boys/men should pull out chairs for ladies
• Always compliment or thank your hostess for the meal they prepared for you

Anyway, the kids were excited to play this game and so we each brought 15 dimes to the table and after a few meals realized we were already ready for level 2.  After playing the game on level 2 for a few meals I made the executive decision to stop playing the game.  Here is my reasoning.  The games original intent is to teach you proper mealtime manners and cause you to be mindful of YOUR manners and what YOU need to work on.  This seems like a great thing and would have likely bettered our family had we adopted this view of the game.  Instead, it appeared that we were all greatly interested in pointing out OTHERS mistakes.  We would sit and stare at each other in silence in hopes that someone would mess up.  We did not talk at all (for fear of breaking the Use Polite Conversation rule) and the kids ate much slower (this is not something we needed since they are incredibly slow eaters already).  So if your family is like ours (extremely competitive [with greedy kids] and already pretty good at table manners) then I would recommend you save the $6.95 and not buy this game.  However if mealtimes at your house more closely resemble feeding time at the hog pen than a family eating together and if you are not super competitive then perhaps this is the game for you.  Please contact me if you are interested in buying our copy, just don't pay us in dimes (we all have plenty of those).

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon