Birthdays, Vocabulary, and Free Rice

One of the things I love about holidays is the family time. I've had a fair amount of it the past three weeks, but of course it's never enough. Not when you enjoy being together the way our family does. Yesterday, we gathered at my youngest sister's home to celebrate her birthday as well as our father's. It was her actual birthday; his is three weeks away, but we wanted to celebrate while we had the whole family together.

We had a great time, talking, eating, and watching family videos. That's another favorite thing we do together. Most often we do this on New Year's Eve, but this was a good opportunity to look back on the fun we've had together, so we took it. We looked at our trip to Norway the summer of 2005, and when the "kids" were very young and sweet and cute and funny. My, that was fun!

On the way home, my oldest niece, the one who goes to college in TN (and who went back this afternoon) told me about a fun and challenging website that she recently discovered. It's called Free Rice and it combines a vocabulary game with a UN project to give rice to underprivileged countries. It works like this (from the website):

• Click on the answer that best defines the word.
• If you get it right, you get a harder word. If wrong, you get an easier word.
• For each word you get right, we donate 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program.

"WARNING: This game may make you smarter. It may improve your speaking, writing, thinking, grades, job performance..."

It's quite addicting. After I got home, I went to the site and started playing. I couldn't stop! I wanted to keep earning free rice for someone. In the first hour, I got up to level 47 and had earned over 4,000 grains of rice. Very cool!