My Cell Phone Rang At 1 AM

(This is a couple of days old.  I first published it on my blog.) 

My cell phone rang at 1 AM. Very few people have my cell number and no one calls me at that hour. My heart stopped. It had to be an emergency. I looked at it and it was my daughter who was in the other room of the house. I figured she wanted me to fix her tea or bring her cold medicine as she has one of those yucky winter colds. I picked it up:

“Yes?”

“Do you want to play Scrabble?”

“Right now?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Let me put some slippers on.”

“Hurry up!”

So off I went to the TV room to play Scrabble with the girls. It took them forever to get it set up and by then Tina had decided not to play so Susie and I played. Susie is 17. She got all the “good” letters and by her third turn was about 60 points ahead of me! She looked at her sister and said, “How many times does a high school kid beat a Stanford grad playing Scrabble?” I decided I was not going to help her. I usually do. Not a lot of help but enough to get her through the rough spots or enough to use up her letters at the end so she doesn’t have many points to deduct. But she was being a smart aleck so I decided I wasn’t going to help her.

Her 60 point lead dwindled and at one point I was actually about 77 points ahead of her. Then my lead dwindled. I did end up helping her once when she wanted to trade a letter I had. I let her have it and had her put any letter she wanted into the bag and I shook it up and pulled one out at random. It was an “A” which was perfect for a 39 point word I had been eying. She started to get a little worried because she was going to have to deduct all the high point letters. She used the Q and the X and the Z in three consecutive turns. She felt a little better and my lead dwindled but I was still a bit ahead of her.

In the end, she beat me by 2 points.

It makes me glad that she has paid attention to playing the game and has learned how to play and what words to play to beat her mom.

But next time, I will beat her!