Mahjong

Kenton and I played mahjong with his parents for a couple of hours today. It was a lot of fun. Mahjong is basically rummy, but played with cute colorful small tiles. There are three different suits – sticks, circles, and thousands - each from one to nine. Then there is another suit, each with four tiles. The tiles in this suit are: 'south,’ ‘north,’ ‘west,’ ‘east,’ ‘white face,’ ‘rich,’ and ‘red middle.’ The object of the game is to get three of a kind or three in a row (i.e. 4, 5, 6) of each suit (a set), along with one pair of any suit. The game is set up by ‘building a wall’ in the shape of a square – 16 tiles across and 2 high. Each person takes turns drawing and discarding a tile. If you are the first to get your four sets and a pair, you win.

The boys: Justin and Brian are getting better. They still were feverish a couple of times during the day, but are now eating and drinking a little bit here and there. Brian is becoming more active again. Justin is still quite fussy and whenever is feverish, he repeatedly says, “I want to go home.”

During the mahjong game, all three boys kept wanting to ‘help.’ They would help ‘build the wall,’ discard tiles, and add extra tiles to our hands (Brian).

I had brought about a dozen paperback books in the ‘Magic Tree House’ series for Kevin to read. He had never read them before, but beginning today, is really enjoying the different stories. I figured that a dozen books would be plenty for the trip – wrong. He’s already read half of them – all today.