Losing

Modern family tonight is about a poor loser - in this case it's the father at chess. In our case it was Jud. The worse loser ever. In the history of young children.

Jud was such a bad loser that we came up with ways to avoid winning at all costs. He would throw a huge tantrum hissy fit. It was quite unpleasant. Children's games are torture anyway. Games like Candyland - which sure, has a fun-sounding name, but is probably the suckiest game ever.

In Candyland one would select color-coded cards, traveling along a color coded path - with a few good and bad cards and path pieces thrown in. The worst was Clumpy or something like that - when you picked that card, you had to go all the way back to the beginning of the game. You were screwed. Jud did not like that. He would be very angry if he selected Clumpy.

Candyland was pretty hard to reverse cheat at. But we managed - by putting a slight bend in the Clumpy card. Ha! You can pull the wool over a 4-year old's eyes. Especially if the kid wants to win badly enough. And he did.

Chutes and Ladders was another distressing game. One would climb climb climb those ladders and then somehow land upon a chute that would take you so far back. Jud did not like that. I don't remember how we got around that one...

Once we got video games it was hard to cheat. Jud spent a lot of time stomping his feet and yelling at the games. Somehow our first giant Gameboy ended up with a cracked screen in the bottom of his closet He swears he knows not how...

The good news is, once puberty hit, he was magically cured of this insane inability to handle losing. Okay not totally, but he is much better. I think it was all that family therapy as a child - our successful handling of gameplaying. Or maybe not.