SHE SANK MY BATTLESHIP ... TWICE.

My daughter decides to do laundry at my house.  This is excellent because my washer takes a nice long time to run its cycle, and I can set the dryer for as few as sixty minutes and as many as ninety minutes, so I can force her to stay at my house for a really, really long time. 

While she is here, she suggests we play a game.

Somehow, I am not really certain about the course of the conversation, we end up playing Battleship.  Yes, a war game.  How appropriate for and conducive to pleasant family dynamics.  Not.  Truth is that we are both rather competitive when it comes to games.

The downside is that we think the same way. My first thought is to set up all of my ships on the outer edges of the grid, but I resist temptation.  I cannot find her ships right away, but she scores a direct hit on her first turn.  Turns out many of my daughter's ships really are on the outer edges, after all.  She thinks too much like I do. 

Then, I wonder about lumping all of the ships together in the middle.  Too easy, I tell myself.  Hit one, hit them all.  Again, I resist temptation.  This time, though, I wonder if my daughter is pulling the same strategy that I just jettisoned, so I go for the middle of the grid and start wiping her ships out almost immediately.

In the end, though, my daughter wins our mini-tournament.  We only get through three games, and she wins two of them.  After that, it's time to get her laundry out of the dryer and fold it all up nicely so she can take it home.  Perhaps next time I can convince her to play a more sedate, less stressful game, like Barbie: Queen of the Prom, or maybe even Go Fish.  At least I won't have to pout and tell her, "Hey, you sank mommy's battleship!"