Show Me the Money!

For the past two evenings, my daughter and I have been battling over the Monopoly board. Since I am a huge Snoopy collector, I bought a Snoopy-themed Monopoly game a few years ago and it's been sitting in a drawer ever since.

What fun is that?

So when my daughter opened said drawer, spotted it, and asked if we could play, I thought, why not?

This game is so darn cute. Instead of real estate, you actually buy Snoopy's property: his typewriter (Literary Ace); his sunglasses (Joe Cool); his golf clubs (Joe Golfer) and numerous others.

The little game pieces are just adorable. Here's the two we picked out - I'm the Dancing Snoopy and my daughter is Snoopy the Red Baron. And boy, does it ever fit her take-no-prisoners style of playing!

I figured since I've played this game numerous times before, I'd go easy on my eight-year-old daughter. Big mistake. She has obviously played it before with her dad and she is quite the financial wizard! She loves it when she buys property and loves it even more when I land on that property. Look at this - she even put houses on them!

For the "railroads" on this particular game, they substituted the seasons - fall, winter, spring, summer. And if you buy all four, well, the poor person who lands on one of them has to pay out the yin yang. I can't begin to count how many times I landed on those seasons...and yes, she bought all four of them.

"Show me the money, Mom!"

"Watch out, Snoopy! You're risking almost certain financial ruin if you land on 'summer'!"
Toward the end of last night's game, my daughter actually had a stack of $100 bills- and no, I didn't let her cheat, didn't let her get away with anything. She earned it all by being, well, just incredibly good at this game.

We are having an absolute blast. And hey, I may be broke by the end of the game, but that's ok. I'm spending time with my daughter, she's learning how to count money (and boy, is she learning to count a lot of it), and we are not missing the t.v. at all.