Dice (an Elizabeth story)

[velvetpage]

In order to understand this post, you must have one crucial piece of information about our family. My husband and I are inveterate role-players. For the uninitiated among you, that means we own large numbers of dice. Some are the usual little cubes with pips on them that you'll find with any board game. Some are cubes with digits instead of pips. Some have four sides, some eight, many have ten, a few have twelve or twenty or even, in one case, thirty-four. My dice box is a big hexagonal make-up box, silver in colour, a gift at Christmas from sassy_fae and etherlad. I have about sixty different dice in it. About half of those are ten-sided.

Elizabeth loves my dice box. When we have people over to role-play, she will sit in my lap or someone else's and play with the dice. One of her first hundred words, back when we were still counting the new ones, was "dice!" She loves rolling them, throwing them, and fiddling with them.

Well, this morning, Elizabeth decided she wanted to play with the dice. "Boite! Dice pease, Mommy!" And she plopped it down on top of the newspaper. The news being supremely uninteresting this morning, I agreed to open the box. She proceeded to take out one white ten-sided die. She rolled this, quite expertly - it went about ten inches and came to rest in the middle of the table. "C'est un cinq!" I told her. "Cinq, six, sept!" said Elizabeth. Then she picked out another die from the box, a six-sider this time, and rolled again. "Deux!" I announced. "Deux, trois, quatre!" said Elizabeth. Then she looked back at the first die. "Cinq!"

She took out fifteen or so dice, one at a time, spending several minutes with the lovely marbilized purple ten-sider that is my personal favourite. "Purple! Purple dice!" she told me, before rolling it. "Quatre!" said I, and she said, "purple quatre, cinq, six!" Once she rolled a die and it rolled right into the pocket on the front of my pygamas. She laughed and laughed. "Mommy, dice poche!"

Shortly after that we played the Ramasse game, otherwise known as "clean up!" As she put them into the box, she was counting, in English this time. "Two, three, four, five, six! Two, three, four, five, six! Eleven, fourteen! Three, four, all done!"

She's so smart. :)

Comments

[ruiskafleck.livejournal.com]

*grins* I love that she's learning how to count with the aid of 'gaming' dice. That rocks.

[redeem147.livejournal.com]

Who said gaming isn't educational? ;)

I love fannish babies.