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Show It's fun to play kids. They're easy to beat 5 the editor's column Games serve a very definite purpose in our house - to teach the kids that Dad is smarter than they are. This is very important, especially at a time when the older children are starting to discover they already know everything that their parents try to tell them. I know, that isn't supposed to happen until the kids are teenagers. But the fact is, I have a hard time talking to my nine-year-old daughter without her informing me that she already knows everything I am saying. And even Adrienne, who turns 8 in a week, thinks Daddy is the dumbest person around. Oh, there are other ways to demonstrate a parent's superiority than through games. Just last week, when Shannan (she's 11) needed to do some reading to me for a class assignments, I told her to read to me out of the book I'm reading. The book, "Time's Arrows," deals with how physicists view time and theories about why time only works one way. It has a lot of big words. I think I understand it. (Look for this topic in future columns -- or maybe in one I've already written. At this point in time, I'm no longer sure which way I'm going.) Now I'm not cruel. I let the little ones win when we play Candyland, or Cootie, or Memory (mainly because I can't remember). Those little ones know instinctively that Daddy is smarter than they are and they accept winning with a joy that ' warms my heart. It's those older kids, the ones old enough to gloat, who need the lesson. The kids know their father, and their mother, love board games. They've been present at lots of family gatherings where all the adults gathered around the kitchen table to spend hours playing games. And they've grown up with every house containing a closet dedicated to the growing number of games this ' family keeps collecting. So when Erin brings out her "Wheel of Fortune" game, she knows I'll be game. And she ought to know I'll win. But she doesn't. (These kids still haven't learned that you don't play word games with a newspaper editor.) Recently, however, I bought the most instructive game of all - Risk I've never had my own Risk before but I knew if I did, I could annihilate the kids. That would be fun. When I came across the game at an acceptable ac-ceptable price, I snatched it up. Sunday afternoon, we settled down for war - my wife, the twoofe A and me. T"e Not to bore you with the dm lm eliminated my wife from Itef n'"j early on. ( I expect to be lf "j sometime before my birthdr at July.) But that older kid of mi sen so lucky. After about three hours, still battling for control of and in one particularly k battle, I lost and lost and ten. hammered the table with rr and said something daddies . supposed to say around children. The lesson was not going During a break in the went into the bathroom i Nancy bathe the little ones. "That kid is so lucky!" 1 her. "So I heard," was her i' t reply. (Maybe I won't be If ' until our anniversary in Aug T In the end the game outlay U Shannan and me -andweca' draw. But I know if we I time, I could really t"1 lesson. We're making plans ' a longer game next weekend How else can I pa.v hcr beating me 18 times in Con 1 Sunday morning when 1 1 J win 7 times. J By MARC HADDOCK Anyway, it was kind of fun to hear this smart aleck sixth grader stumble over all those big words. By the time she got done, she figured her dad must be smart if he understood un-derstood all those words. (I, of course, did not tell her that I didn't understand some of them either. After all, at least half the business of parenting involves bluffing.) But it's more fun to prove to kids that you are smarter than they are when you're playing games -especially if you like to win like I do |