Julie's Boggle

About a week ago now, we first managed to get a proper demonstration of Jon sitting solo. Or “wobbling triumphantly on [his] little fundament” to borrow a wonderful Libby Purves expression.

Sitting upright opens up whole new vistas in baby entertainment of course, and Jonathan seems to really enjoy it. Until the untrained muscles begin to take strain (about 15 minutes) and then he gripes and whines a bit, and often chucks up his last meal…

We had been very concerned about leaving the wobbly boy without a supportive adult within arm’s reach (witness the slightly reddened patch on his right temple in the photo above), and spent our time rearranging copious piles of cushions every time we moved him.

That was until Monday when I attacked the old mattress that came with his cot with a breadknife. From the middle of it, I carved out a large U-shaped hole that nicely takes a sitting Jonathan with space to spare, and still gives him a fat ridge of padding at the back. (Good thing cots are so wide!) I then shoved the doctored foam back into its waterproof cover.

Now with a quilt over it, padding the area in front of him, he can sit (or topple over) quite comfortably!

The other day, while is a slightly random frame of mind, I googled for “Boggle” — a game I remembered being given as a birthday present when I was about 10.

I used to find this game a little dull as a child, so I vaguely wondered if I’d been missing anything.

The Boggle I owned came with 16 dice with a letter printed on each side. You would shake these dice around in their little plastic box and then rattle it a bit more to allow them to fall into the 16 die-shaped spaces in the base. From there, I recall you had a 3-minute timer to create as many words as you could out of the visible letters.

From the search results, I found a site where some bright chap has recreated Boggle on the web. (Except he won’t call it Boggle because he’s worried that Hasbro will come after him with a big legal stick. )

It turns out that this version of Boggle is a LOT more fun. For starters, you get to play against lots of other people on the internet. And as an added bonus, after each round finishes, a computer works out all the words that were possible with those letters — so you feel continually challenged about all the words that you missed!

One other rule that had slipped my mind was that, to make a word, you have to jump, horizontally, vertically or diagonally, from letter to letter. And you can only jump to an adjacent letter.

Anyhoo, Tom and I have been wasting passing lots of time on this slightly addictive site, on evenings when we’re feeling alert and all out of DVD’s to watch.

To you start off, you pick either the 4×4 board or a 5×5 board. Then it’s just a question of typing in words as as fast as you see them and getting scored for valid ones. Each game is just 3 minutes long and you have about a half-minute breather between rounds to look at all the words you failed to see and kick yourself for not seeing them.

So for example, in the board above, I found GRIN quite easily, but completely missed the opportunity for PRATTLER or TARTANS… And they were right there all along!

Friday was a gorgeous day but, I must admit, I was feeling a little low at the start. The arrangements I’d made to see a friend had just fallen through at the last minute, leaving me at a loose end…

Getting out seemed to be the thing to do. So I threw a few essentials together, bundled us both up against the crisp air, and headed out with Jon in his pushchair to visit one of the local parks that we don’t get to very often.
Unusually (for London in early February), it was beautifully warm in the sun. And while I was still relishing that sensation, we rounded a corner and found an oasis of spring-time right there in the park.

Striking splashes of brilliant spring colour were scattered all across this particular patch of lush, green grass.

I realised I was feeling better already, but that was not the end of the spring magic.

Just a little further along, were a couple of trees who were clearly (and surprisingly), as excited as the bulbs about the warming weather. They had covered themselves with delicate pink flowers.

As signs of the UK spring go, cherry blossom is my particular favourite. The first sighting each year is always something I look forward to.

And then I turned back to the pushchair where Jon was very happily in the middle of (what was undoubtedly) THE most delicious apple-flavoured rice-cake ever made.

Life is good.

The sun was shining brightly last Friday afternoon, but it was bone-numbingly cold out. Still, the time seemed ripe to take Jonathan for one of those formative childhood experiences: playing on the swings at the local playground.

He was quite fascinated by the toddler being pushed on the adjacent swing but did enjoy his own swinging experience quite a lot too. (Caught on a little movie that makes me dizzy to watch.)

Then we went home because my hands were going numb.