| PRO TIPS

This seems obvious, but make sure the kid is able to take a bottle before you start your leave! Otherwise you are in for some hard times, my friend. That was our situation when I did my leave (in a similar plan) and although it was a great month, it was also way frickin' rougher than it needed to be. Struggled through the whole month, then put her in daycare for ONE DAY and she was fine with the bottle.

Also, if you are planning to put her in day care and don't have one figured out already, start now!!! Day cares can only take limited numbers of kids under 2 so it can be very hard to find a spot.

We don't have a TON to do around here and we already have one bassinet -- mainly it's getting the spare one out of the shed, cleaning it and rebuilding it, putting together the new two-person stroller, etc.

We were a little worried about how Kid 1 would take to the new one, but so far she seems pretty stoked! She wants to go in and see him sleeping all the time, tries to incorporate him into her games (when she's picking up all her books and handing them out to mommy and daddy, she'll try giving some to him), talks about him a bunch when he's not around and is good at being quiet when he's sleeping. She has had some jealousy, and a couple days of weird/bad sleep (nightmares?) that we were wondering if they were related to anxiety/change, but last night she slept like a champ, so hopefully that's past?

Because no post would be complete without talking about LotR: make sure to log your games in the Google form I set up! I got crushed by Quest 2 about 12 times before I set up the form. I got in a few games yesterday: one loss and one win against Hunt for Gollum, got CRUSHED by Journey to Rhosgobel (I just had totally the wrong kind of deck), and pretty easily beat Hills of Emyn Muil (that one was actually kind of a snoozer, lots and lots of locations). I skipped Conflict at the Carrock because that one's supposed to be a beast, and you need a deck really geared towards fighting.

To continue the title of this post here are some rules I messed up when learning to play, maybe it'll help you:
- Yes, Thalin kills the stupid crows before they have a chance to Surge (this is in the errata)
- If you don't successfully quest, you gain threat equal to the difference. If you just match the threat in the staging area, it's still questing successfully, even though you don't get any progress tokens.
- Use the cheat sheet in the back of the book (or a reference from BGG) to walk through the turns and know when you can play actions.
- Characters who committed to a quest stay committed until the end of the phase (this seems obscure but is sometimes really important)
- If you don't defend an attack, you have to apply the damage directly to a hero, ignoring their armor value.
- Multiple characters can attack the same enemy. You combine their attack score.
- Most importantly, HAVE FUN!