My very first encounter with the board game Trivial Pursuit was during a gathering of cousins around Grandma Elizabeth’s kitchen table on the farm up in Kandiyohi County.

My older cousins Kelly and Chris were so smart, they knew the answers to just about every question written on those small, rectangular cards. At one point, the less gullible cousins went so far as to accuse them of memorizing all of the answers … after all, the board game did belong to them.

From that day on, I longed to have my own Trivial Pursuit game. How much fun it was to be quizzed on such things as, “Which famous actor married Nancy Davis?” and “What Major League Baseball player nicknamed his bat, ‘Black Betsy’?” (By the way, the answers are Ronald Reagan and Babe Ruth.)

A year ago, I found the “Best of Genus” edition on the clearance shelf of a local store. I couldn’t resist … I had to have it.

So on Saturday night, with my sister-in-law visiting the family farm with the kids, we pulled out Trivial Pursuit and faced off at the dining room table.

She warned me she wasn’t any good at trivia, and I said, “Don’t worry … it’ll be fun!”

Half an hour later, I had none of those colorful pieces in my little plastic pie. She had two.

While the boxes aren’t marked, I’d say she was asking questions from the “difficult” box and I was asking questions from the “less difficult” box. I’m not making excuses here, I’m just saying … well … I think she had the luck of the draw.

Eventually, we fudged the playing rules and stopped moving our pie plate around the board. We pulled out the cards, scanned for the easiest questions in the color categories still needed and managed to eventually crown a winner. It wasn’t me.

Actually, I’d dare to say neither one of us really “won” at Trivial Pursuit that night. We finished the game both feeling like a couple of stupid people! In our defense, the questions were really, really challenging.

Wallowing in self-pity after my loss, I brought out the deck of Old Maid cards. Now here’s a game I’m pretty good at … and don’t you dare think it’s because of my unmarried status … I am not old!

I’ll admit that my opponents were the 8-year-old and 9-year-old nephews, but does age really matter?

Old Maid has been a favorite card game in my family ever since my three brothers and I were little kids. Our deck of cards was so mangled from the hours spent passing around the ugly Old Maid card to unsuspecting opponents.

For those unfamiliar with the game, it features one Old Maid card and doubles of every other card in the deck. You get rid of your hand by making matches, and the one left holding the Old Maid loses the game.

It’s great entertainment playing with the nephews, who can’t help but giggle, fidget or make distorted facial expressions when they get their hands on the card featuring the old, gray-haired woman.

On Saturday night, Round 1 went something like this: The Old Maid card was dealt to me, but I sat quietly as nephews Zach and Blake each accused the other of having the Old Maid card. I put it in the center of my fanned out cards and within a couple of plays, the card was in Zach’s collection.

My exuberant reaction let Blake know that the Old Maid had been handed off, much to Zach’s dismay!

Zach took his cards under the table, shuffled them this way and that, and reappeared with a fanned-out display for Blake.

Wouldn’t you know, Blake plucked the Old Maid card and ended up losing the game.
In Round 2, Zach started out with Old Maid, passed it on to Blake, who then passed it on to me.

By then, I had just one card left so I took the cards under the table, gave them a studious glance and turned the Old Maid card upside down in my hand. The reason … over time, the kids have tried to alert themselves to the Old Maid card by bending the corners.

And, over the years, I’ve tried to counteract the cheating by bending the corners on every other card in the deck.

By flipping the Old Maid upside down, it appeared the corners were in fairly good shape compared to the corners on the other card I was holding.

Naturally, Zach took the bait and ended up with the Old Maid! And, obviously, I had to celebrate my cunning ability to win at a game of cards with a “woot woot!,” a clap of the hands and a “Na na na boo boo, I beat you!”

Yeah, I don’t act my age all of the time … so what! That’s why I’m their favorite auntie.

Nephew Blake introduced me to one of the friends at his birthday party Sunday by saying, "This is my aunt Julie, she always picks on me." He was grinning when he said it, so it couldn’t have been a bad thing.

I looked at the boy and asked, "Do you have aunties?"

"Yes, but they don’t pick on me," he said, almost dejected.

"Well, that’s what aunts are for!"

Nephew Blake is always the one pestering me about why I don’t have kids of my own. Frankly, I never wanted kids … I like the kind I can take fishing, sugar up, tickle senseless and then take back home to Mom and Dad. It’s kind of like shaking a can of pop and then giving it to someone else to open up when the fun is over!

I figure that since I had to deal with three brothers growing up, the least I can do is give them a headache every now and then.

It is nephew Blake’s eighth birthday on Tuesday, but he had a birthday party on Sunday and invited Grandma and Grandpa Buntjer and Auntie Juwee, along with 10 of his closest friends.

For two and a half hours they played kickball and competed in an obstacle course that involved running through rubber tires, throwing lawn darts and bean bags, playing Bolo, racing around orange cones and shooting hoops. They ate pizza, chips, cupcakes and ice cream cake … and then had a belching contest like typical little boys. After all that, only one complained of a tummy ache!

When the last kid left, Blake went back through his presents and picked out the new pair of squirt guns he had received. We filled them up with the hose and then it was war. Here he thought all of his playmates had left … little did he know his Auntie is nothing more than a big kid when it comes to a good ol’ fashioned water fight!

By the time our water war was over, I had managed to get only a little wet. Blake, on the other hand, was doused from head to toe, as was his little brother (my Godson) Reece. I think they now realize that Auntie Juwee cannot be trusted with the water hose … it’s so much more effective than those little squirt guns!