We seem to have hit another milestone in our family. All three of our children are now old enough to play a cooperative game together. This is unusual because generally speaking, 2-year-olds do not play games like this with other kids very well. Typically they would just grab those fish and do what they wanted with them rather than play properly. We've been working on taking turns a lot around here though, and that helped him be willing to hand off the beloved fishing pole and wait his turn to go fishing.
This is our Fisher Price Go Fish game. The object is to use the fishing pole with the suction cup on the end to catch a fish from the pond. The bottom of the fish is either one of the 4 colors, or an item of litter. If they catch a fish of their color they get to keep it and put it in their boat. If they catch the wrong color they have to throw it back. First player to fill their boat wins. There are other ways to play, there are numbers on the bottoms too, but we really only do the color one.
Babydoll kicked butt at this game that night!
Poor Little Man kept finding everyone elses colors, but it didn't phase him at all. he wasn't discouraged by the fact he was losing, he just had fun playing with his big sisters!
And my oldest just can't help make faces and pose when there's a camera in front of her.
Sitting around the "fish pond" with my 3 little punkinheads and realizing that they were all, even my toddler, playing cooperatively together a game that was not ring-around-the-rosie moved me - I had to capture the moment!
So when they are all in their 20's and talking about the drinking games or whatever they played the weekend before, I'll be able look back on when they all happily played Go Fish together on the living room carpet and smile.
