Praise for Clictime LLC and Lego Customer Service

Today in the mail we received a small package from Clictime, LLC.

Enclosed in the envelope was a Lego Ninjago Kai ZX watch head.  To my 9 year-old, it was great excitement. For Christmas he received a Lego Ninjago Kai ZX watch from his aunt and uncle. He really loved the watch and was really, really bummed in January when a piece on the watch face broke. It didn't seem to break from mis-use which as a parent it would be used as a teaching moment. It broke during normal use.

The watch sat on my counter for I'm not sure how many weeks, and I finally called Lego to see if we could get a piece. My son was quite patient in waiting for me and probably really gave up on me. Once I finally put forth the effort, I was instructed to contact Clictime through their website as Lego does not make the watches themselves. The website form was quick and easy to complete. I'm not sure why it took me so long to do this!

Within a couple of days I received a reply saying to send them the broken piece. My son patiently waited again on mom to get it in the mail which I did finally mail it last week. Then in the mail today we received a replacement, no bill!

I appreciated the friendly customer service that I received from Lego. Clictime exceeded my expectations by replacing the part from my return! Just thought that I would use my small abilities to praise a company and not complain!

Now this is being sported on my son's arm again!

Konexi - The gravity defying word game.

We are word game people. We love a good game of Boggle, Big Boggle really and not just that little 4x4 square. OK, mostly the adults and maybe just because we are a little too competitive for the boys to join in. We have recently been playing Scramble with Friends on our phones - pretty addicting.  (If you want to play with either one of us, we are up for new challengers.)

For Christmas we received Konexi - the Premium Edition. The boys and I played it for the first time today. My younger son liked it a lot. The game combines building with letters and making words. I think he liked the building with the letters the best. We played by the rules that were in the package.

We had a pretty good time playing the game. It's a very pretty game and stores well. The letters are fun with all of their notches in them. We played about four rounds in-between some other school subjects today. The rounds were pretty short. We found the game challenging and interesting. Though, I don't see this surpassing Boggle any time soon as the word game of choice.

There is only one of each letter of the alphabet so the words that can be created are limited. At the beginning of the game, the letters are randomly placed in a circle. On your turn, you roll the dice to move the marker between two letters. You get to choose between one of the letters and add it to the existing letter structure.  It's mostly luck on what letters are added to the structure, unless you roll the option to pick any available letter. In the course of our playing, we had only one 5 letter word and lots of three letter words. We were not able to get our structures very tall so the possibility of making long words consistently seems rare. Making three and four letter words out of difficult letters may get a little tedious. (Our structures weren't as adventurous as the picture on the box and the order of our letters generally was a bit more difficult I X Z V don't make too many words, especially since the I was the first letter.)

My competitive nine year old spent a long time on his turn trying to come up with the longest word that he could and spent most of his time trying to make up words. I was getting bored waiting for him and said that he couldn't suggest a word out loud unless he could use it in a sentence. He wanted to win and so wasn't contented with a three letter word. You get one point for every letter in your word. I think it may be better to have some letters worth more points like in Scrabble. As an example, mix is worth more points than pat. When there is only one of each letter, that may not really make any sense. I have the same issue with Bananagrams too.

In summary, we will play Konexi again. I appreciate this as a thoughtful gift to a game playing family. You never know when you will find a jewel of a game though this wasn't it for us. I'll let you know if we come up with some good rules to make the game better for our family.

Did you get any new fun games?

3x5 Folded Card

Family Portrait Thank You Card

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Summer Meals

A few weeks ago we put together a two week rotating schedule for our summer meals. We put all of the shopping lists into Our Groceries on our phones so it's easily accessible! We have gone through two weeks now (though not consecutively) and it's worked pretty well.

Here's the menu...just let me know if you plan to join us!

Week 1
Monday: Cold Chicken Strips and Hummus with Veggies - Picnic at Baseball game
Tuesday (boys cook): Pancakes and Bacon
Wednesday: Tortilla Soup
Thursday: BLT's (hopefully tomatoes from the garden soon)
Friday: Dinner at Koenig parents
Saturday: Cold Pasta Salad
Sunday: Church potluck - Ham slices & Veggie

Week 2
Monday: Wraps - Picnic at Baseball game
Tuesday (boys cook): Scrambled Eggs and Ham Slices
Wednesday: Bean Burritos
Thursday: Chicken Breasts & Smashed Potatoes
Friday: Stuffed Baked Potatoes
Saturday: Stir Fry
Sunday: Church potluck: Black Beans & Rice

Review of Gifts - Beat the Parents

(I figured out how to put in a picture for this one.)

Beat the Parents was one of my gifts that I received.

There are questions that kids ask parents and questions that parents ask kids. You move across the board in opposite directions. If you land on the same space, you can move your opponent back. (Instead of Battle of the Sexes, it's parents versus kids.) The box says ages 6+.

We've played this game a couple of times. It's not a good fit for our family. Our kids trounce on on the parents. When our kids can win the game and we are virtually at the starting line, it's not a ton of fun.

Why is it not a good fit for our family? The parents in our family are not familiar with all of the teeny-bopper shows on Disney Channel, we do not know much about Harry Potter or the Lord of the Rings Trilogy and our repertoire of pre-teen music is limited. In our opinion, the kids questions are pretty easy general trivia and the parents questions are pop culture for children and pre-teens from the 2000's. With our family, it makes for a very one-sided game. The kids are good generalists on things like primary colors, names of continents, identification of mammal, reptile or fish, etc. The parents don't watch the Disney Channel or listen to teeny-bopper music.

This game will be for sale or donated soon. If your family is somewhat like ours, I do not recommend this game. Let me know if you would like to buy it from us!

Reviews of gifts - Rory's Story Cubes

We received Rory's Story Cubes as a gift this year. We already had these, but I wanted to sing their praises and will be happily re-gifting these!

The story cubes are a set of 9 six-sides cubes with different pictures.

You roll the cubes and then tell a story based on what you see. There aren't really rules, the cubes are just a "help" in being imaginative.

We've played where the cubes are rolled and each person works on a story one cube at a time alternating with each cube. We've also played where a person has to tell part of the story with everything that they rolled and the next person rolls all of the cubes again and continues with the story.

Most recently, we had a Benjamin Franklin themed time with the cubes. Each one of us rolled and we had to talk about Benjamin Franklin based on the cubes that came up. (I knew that there was a picture of a key and a picture of a lightening bolt so those were easy. A turtle kept coming up during this session and we were concluding that he did not study sea turtles, but you never know.)

I would like to incorporate these more into my homeschool writing assignments. We struggle with writing, and I hope that we can maybe use the story cubes to get some more creative writing done!

They come in a fun package too which is always good for containment and transport! The box says 8+ for ages. Adults can even have fun with this one!

If you are in Rolla, these were at Rolla Toy and Book and here's the link to Amazon. (I do not get any commission from this link.)