Sudoku Challenge

The newest Blackwing Volume has been released, Volume 20, and it is celebrating tabletop games. Fun! We play a lot of games around here, mostly board games, having not quite arrived to Dungeons and Dragons yet. We do sometimes need a pencil to keep score at Scrabble or as more of a main character in Pictionary.

However, these pencils came right in time as we as a family have taken on sudokus. Caleb recently got into sudoku, and now Naomi is beginning as well, having started with the 4 x 4 and then moving into the 6 x 6. I, of course, have been dabbling in sudoku since my university days, and sometimes it’s a bit unnerving how much of a crunch I need to put my brain in to complete a hard one.

It’s always fun to see the Blackwings in action—although sometimes the kids are using those terrible dollar store birthday party pencils that keep breaking or make waxy, dull marks on the page. And the extendable eraser is nice because I do use little numbers for the hard ones.

In any case, I’ve found it quite meditative, to sit with a pencil out on the deck, the pleasant scratch of the numbers going into boxes. Little marks on a page. We have a family competition going on, to see who can finish their book first. I believe I may be the most enthusiastic about this, Caleb’s initial competitive drive having died out after the first couple of pages. I’ll keep you updated.

***

Life has been busy—when has it not? For whom is it not?—and it feels like we’ve had appointments everywhere, appointments I’d forgotten I’d made, dinners with friends, meetings with distributors, birthday parties, music lessons. It’s bliss to be in the swamp of life. What would I be doing with myself if not hunting around in beds for overdue library books, taking photos of new products and mentally queuing them up for priority testing, cajoling one child or another into taking an instrument out of a case.

Everything changes, grows, ebbs and flows, waxes and wanes, me trying to step into the same river a hundred times. Already, I am having a hard time keeping up with Junia, walking and toddling and having opinions and secret thoughts. She sees something she wants across the room, and makes her way there, over and around various obstacles. Pretty soon she’s going to be doing her own sudoku book.