I have a competitive personality.

And so does my husband.

Which makes it potentially alarming—yet strangely exhilarating—on the extremely rare occasions when we actually compete against each other. And what better time for cutthroat tactics than during a simple board game with our children over Christmas break?

It started with an innocent trip to Barnes & Noble. My husband has the distinction of being born on New Year’s Eve, so it’s always a scramble to find birthday gifts for him after the Christmas rush. This year, I ran into the bookstore, hoping to be inspired, and I came across a “Deluxe” version of Scrabble.

“Deluxe”!!!

I had visions of tiles made of gold, a marble game board, and a delicate parchment score pad with an accompanying peacock feather quill pen. And the price reinforced my misguided fantasy.

Okay, I’m in.

Of course, upon opening the game, we discovered that the “Deluxe-ness” (by the way, don’t try using that word in the actual Scrabble game…) referred to the fact that the board is bigger than a regular board and rotates—but it really didn’t matter. The important part is WHO WINS.

So, determined to implement our inaugural Wholesome Family Game Night, we called the kids over to the table. They reluctantly (and by “reluctantly” I mean “As If They Were Being Asked to Swallow a Ferret Soaked in Acid”) shuffled over to the game board, and sat down.

For those of you who aren’t Scrabble aficionados, each player is given a set of letter tiles from which they must construct words, crossword-fashion, on the game board spaces. Certain spaces have double or triple (and even QUADRUPLE in the “Deluxe” version!) scores, so strategic placement of the letters is crucial.

We began.

My husband and I spent a long time on each turn, agonizing over how to maximize our scores. My son soon got into the spirit of the competition, and we overlooked the fact that his pride-and-joy word (”Quran”) was a proper noun. The Competition Gene is clearly absent in the case of my daughter, who only looked up from her Agatha Christie novel long enough to slap two letters around a vowel, creating such stunners as “M-A-T” and “F-I-N.” (She did, however, impress us somewhat with “V-E-X.”)

But things started getting a little dicey when my husband put down “F-A-T-B-O-Y.” Ever the bluffer, he dared me to challenge him and look it up in the dictionary (the “Deluxe” Official Scrabble Dictionary, no less!), knowing full well that I would lose my turn if it were indeed a word. He insisted that it was “a type of motorcycle,” so I let it go. (It turns out that there IS such a thing as a Harley-Davidson “Fat Boy,” but it’s TWO WORDS. Whatever.)

The game was close, the letters were almost gone, and it was my turn. I had O, Z, O and T left to work with.

OZOT? TOOZ? ZOTO?

Spying the word “RAIN” already on the board (probably one of the more exotic creations from my daughter), I was elated, and added my letters to the beginning to make “Z-O-O-T-R-A-I-N.” And the “Z” went on a Quadruple Letter space! I hit the jackpot!

My husband, dubiously: “What’s a zootrain?”

Me, defiantly: “It’s the wee little train that you ride around the zoo! Duh.”

My children were in stitches by this time, and my daughter high-fived me for the off-the-charts “cuteness” factor of the word—the only thing that REALLY counts as far as she is concerned. I gave my husband my best “If You Really Value Our Marriage, You Will NOT Challenge Me” look, and I could see the wheels turning as he weighed his options.

Finally, coming to the most logical (= wife-pleasing) conclusion, he shrugged his shoulders and started adding up my points.

Knowing better than to look it up then and there, he added, “But I’d better see the word “zootrain” written somewhere!”

I still haven’t looked it up. But I DO know that it’s the title of a blog, out there for the whole world to see. (And you can believe everything you read on the Internet, can’t you?)

Take THAT, Fatboy!

(Love you!)

Oh, and I win.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 9th, 2009 at 3:12 pm and is filed under parent. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.