Good Part- Hard Part

What was your good part? What was your hard part?

We have a dinner time tradition at our house, where each person tells everyone a good part of his or her day and a hard part of his or her day. We’ve been doing this for a couple of years at and it’s a lot of fun. Whenever we have people over for dinner we always play it with them and they seem (or at least pretend) to enjoy it too, so I thought I would share it.

Usually when we have guests over for dinner they want to call it good part, BAD part, but we are all quick to correct them. My wife came up with the idea of keeping the conversation positive so instead of talking about things that were bad we talk about things that were hard.

It’s always easy to tell when my oldest daughter Eloise is grumpy or tired because she would say things like, “I don’t have any good parts and here are my six bad parts. She would then go into great detail to discuss the trials and tribulations of a six-year-old, examples being: my sister looked at me funny, my dad made me cry, mom’s being mean, my brother didn’t think my joke was funny.” She did this a couple of times so we came up with the rule that you cannot have more hard parts than good parts.

When it’s my son’s turn, he likes to be a bit of a politician sometimes by saying things like, “My good part was the yummy food you made for dinner and my hard part was trying to think of a hard part.”

Our almost two-year-old Maggie has been intently watching us play this game at dinner her whole life. Every night we asked her about her good part and hard part and usually we were met with blank stares. Finally last week we had a breakthrough when she said, “MY good part- mommy home.” Awesome moment!

We have a lot of fun with Good Part/ Hard Part, but our kids are still getting the hang of it. They don’t quite yet understand that someone might want to elaborate after they say each part. For example, I might say my hard part was trying to get snacks at CVS on our way to the park. Our kids would just say, “OK, what’s your good part?” Instead of letting me go on to say getting snacks was hard because my son was unhappy with the snack I bought and pulled my shorts down while I was holding my daughter and paying the cashier. The more we play it, and the older the kids get I think they will begin to understand this little bit more.

If you’ve never tried something like this with your family I would highly recommend it. If you do something similar I would love to hear about it.

Please feel free to share with the rest of us.

-Pete

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