New Year's Eve, baby!

For the last dozen years, we've celebrated New Year's at our friends' home back in PA.  And we thought about what it would take to go there again this year... but with our Christmas trip heading west instead of north, we decided instead to host for ourselves.  Inspired by Wil Wheaton's & Felicia Day's Tabletop, we made up our own Trophy of Awesome and made sure we had tape and a Sharpie on hand.

Beads for everyone, invite your friends!

We played Walk the Plank, Clue, Harry Potter Uno (which is like regular Uno, but with a Howler wild card that makes you tell everyone every single card in your hand, and an invisibility cloak wild card that shields you from a negative card), Qwirkle, Star Fluxx (it's a card game version of Calvinball), Dutch Blitz, and Blokus.






The Trophy of Awesome made a couple stops, but kept looping back to one individual in particular! She three-peated! (She also wore different headgear each time.)

Also,


The quote of the evening comes from Star Fluxx, Brain parasites! (It's a Creeper.) We even discovered a tactile reference for them, the head-massager whisk. (Sequined hats additional.)

Making nerds

Ours is a world that often seems cynical, detached, and passionless. Ours is a world that needs more nerds. And we need more parents to pass along their nerdery to their kids. I can think of few things more life-giving than saying, “this is something I love and I want you to love it, too.” Maybe it’s music. Maybe it’s backpacking. Maybe it’s cheese.

Doesn’t matter the subject. What matters is the passion.

What kind of nerd are you?

Excerpt from Parenting and Passions and Making Nerds of Your Children on A Deeper Story recently.

It's a bit of an outgrowth from Wil Wheaton's wonderful, heartfelt, and heartstring-tugging off-the-cuff speech on Why it's awesome to be a nerd (speech on YouTube), which he also personally blogged about.



source: As Seen on Tabletop

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