Tobey: Uno crazy

Tobey is crazy over Uno. It's like a drug for him. He needs a "hit" each night before he goes to bed, much like I need my TV downtime. We use it as a bribe to get him to not dawdle during our bedtime routine. We play a family "tournament" most nights: first player to win two games wins so we play anywhere from 2 to 4 games before bed.

He caught onto the rules pretty quickly, matching colors and numbers. We had to remind him about skip and reverse, not that he didn't know what they meant but because he didn't always pay attention to what was happening. But now we can play our games really fast because he is a lot more alert, speed Uno, we call it. We even play silently, he catches all the skipped turns and change in direction without any prompting for us. It's impressive.

More impressive is that he is developing strategy. He likes saving his Wild Draw Four for when someone has only one card (although sometimes he misfires and the Draw Four ends up penalizing the wrong player). I can tell he likes to use his special cards first and change colors whenever he can (over exhausting the same color). I don't know if those all work but he wins more games than I do so he must do something right. Maybe I'm too busy trying to give draw cards to Tom that my own strategy is getting skewed.

He is also an impeccable Uno declarer. Only once in our dozens and dozens of games have I ever caught him forgetting to say Uno. He even remembers to say Uno after he had to draw a card but put it down right away. He catches us forgetting Uno (and even waits for us to take our hand off the card before catching us) -- he just caught me last night.

It's cute to see Tobey grow into a more seasoned player. He started off playing open faced, laying his cards all out on the floor. Sometimes he would prop up a book as a barrier so we can't see his cards (but sometimes ends up telling us about his good cards anyway). We tried teaching him to play holding his cards but his hands couldn't quite get them lined up right to see them at the same time. But lately, he's been trying and if he can't hold them in a fan, then he holds them in a stack and when it's his turn, one by one shuffles through them until he gets to the card he wants. It's not as annoying as it sounds because he looks so cute when he's deciding which card to pick.

And Uno is a family event. If Eli doesn't have to go to bed early, he'll play with me or Tom, being our card lackey, and learning his numbers and colors at the same time. He knows skip, reverse and draw two also. When he sees traffic sings like "No U turn", he yells, "Skip!" because it has the circle with the slash through it, like the Uno card.

And like the Cars obsession, I can tell Tobey is really getting into the Uno because one day when he was eating snack, I heard him declare, "Uno!" What in the world was he talking about? I looked at his plate and he only had once piece of apple left on his plate.