The bear game

I still don't know what it is about this memory game that they love so much. Most of the time they don't even play it properly.

Known around here simply as "the bear game," it totally mesmerizes my children, and has done so for almost two years since it first arrived in the mail as part of my preschool curriculum package. It was great when we started preschool when Abby was 3 years old and Caleb was almost 2. It's great now that Abby's 4.5, Caleb is 3 and Jacob is almost a year and a half old.

Jacob's time with the bears yielded another addition to his growing repertoire of toddler babble: "beh" now means bear. (Not to be confused with "buh" for bird, or "beh-buh" for belly button.) 

I don't know if the makers of these little bears sprinkle them with some sort of magical pixie dust that renders my kids unable to fight or argue, but they played like this--calmly, quietly, and in very close proximity to one another--for almost an hour with little to no intervention from mom.

For a box of cardboard teddy bears, that's no small feat.