Happy Birthday Narene or The Name Game!

Last night we went to the Ireland's for family home evening. It was a hoot. First of all, we had Narene's year wrong. I think she would have been happy to play along with her newly assumed age, since we missed it by a year, in her favor!! Being the gentleman that I am, it will remain for someone else to reveal it to you.

Narene made a wonderful dinner; chicken and rice, macaroni salad, jello salad with colored marshmellows, and a fun carrot salad with white raisans seasoned with cumin, nutmeg, and cinnamon. All of it was very tasty!

Since it was a birthday party, Sam decided that we should just play a game so we dispensed with the lesson. It was a game made for seniors. Here is how it is played. I am writing this down, because if I don't I won't remember it!!

You will need 12 to 14 people to make it interesting. Place everyone seated in a circle with one empty chair. Place everyone's name in bowl and draw a name. If you draw your own name, draw again. Do not reveal whose name you have.

Designate three or four chairs as your target chairs. (We chose three, but more advanced players may want to try four!). Make one of the target chairs the empty chair and place a man and a women in the other two chairs. The object of the game is to get three women or three men all seated in the target chairs.

The game begins with one person seated to left of the blank chair calling out any name in the group. That person, whose name is called (not the real person but the person with that person's name), takes the empty chair and the person to the left of the new empty chair calls out another name. You can't call out the name you are holding and a name can't be called two times in a row.

After the game has been played for some time, and if you have been concentrating (which is hard to do if you are a senior), you can begin to call the names of people to move them the way you want to until you fill the three target seats with members of your sex. The challenge of course is memory, which is in very limited supply among our senior group. I cannot begin to tell you how hard we were laughing as individuals, who could win the game, if they called the right name, could not remember which name to call. This went on over and over. However, when the dust settled, the men had won both of the games that we played.