Catch Phwase

Important preface to the story is that I was a nanny for 3 years in college. All three of the kids I babysat had the same speech impediment. Y's replaced L sounds and W's replaced R's. SO.. Aftew thwee yeaws of babysitting them I yeawned a pewfected babytalk and tend to talk in it fwom time to time. My famiyee has also twied it too and we talk yike it pwobably a yitt-oh too much, you will yeawn once you wead this stowy beyow.

Being home for Thanksgiving was great. What's more to love than family, food and games? I love to bring out all the board games whenever I'm home and force everyone to play at any slight sense of downtime. Waiting for mom to cook? Grab Scategories. Don't want to help with the dishes? Bring out Boggle.

I've had my favorites: Boggle was great last year at Christmas with my bro, Cranium entertained us all for hours last year at Thanksgiving, Balderdash was a hit a couple years ago on family vacation. Scategories is always a winner to me. And what was this year's winner? drumrolllllll......... trusty old Catch Phrase.

For some reason Catch Phrase seemed a little overplayed to me and I wasn't excited at first. Then the "how do you play?" questions started.. my family had never played before? Or had they forgotten?? This could be fun. So I explained the rules to everyone: "You have to say clues about whatever word pops up in this little window viewer thing without saying any part of the word," and I displayed how to click the disk (yes, literally click because we still have the original non-electronic first generation game).

We divided into teams. Me and my brother-in-law against my sister and Mom. We got a few rounds in before Dad's ears perked up at the sound of fun and he relocated from his solitary TV watching to join in. This complicated the teams having 5 people and uneven teams. The new teams were Mom, Sister, Brother-in-law versus Me and Dad. The seating arrangements were complicated too. We had a hard time with the logistics, but got a good game going. We had a nice flow until the buzzer started going spastically fast and Sister would pass to Brother-in-law and it would BUZZ causing Sister to get pissed that even after she got her word guessed, her team would still lose because she passes to her teammate.

Well, I pointed out that her slowdown was on par with mine because Dad was unable to read the tiny print within the disk's word viewer thing. Every time it was passed to him he'd sit there forever before he could make out the word. At one point he and Mom were sharing a pair of glasses back and forth which didn't work so well when they were passing both the disk and the glasses. This is a competition!

It was pure chaos when Mom thought she was trying to get her teammates to guess Bite the Bullet but misread it to be Bite the Dust and embarrassed herself by overly explaining "someone is JUST dead. They're TOTTTALLY dead.... ohmygosh that is NOT the phrase at all" Click to the next word. We all busted out laughing.

Dad was trying to get me to guess encore and my mind went blank. Mom was trying to get her team to guess Fingers and for some reason she apparently had been focused on the chicken fingers I had eaten at the airport TGI Fridays and kept talking about chickens to get her team to guess fingers. No one was even close to guessing fingers when she frustratedly shouted "FORGET ABOUT THE CHICKENS!!"

But the best Catch Phrase moment of all was when my mom was trying to get her teammates to guess broom so she said "You SWEEP with it!" and my sister yelled "a BLANKET!!"

Sounds yike my big sistoh has had a yitt-oh too much baby talk when she mistook SWEEP for SLEEP!