The last 24 hours have been an orgy of card-playing.

Last night was our monthly poker game. In preparation, I scoured my closet, looking for my most festive/tacky shirt. I christened it "My Lucky Shirt". Everyone else called it "Mike's gay shirt", but they were just jealous of the tremendous luck it bestowed upon me. Plus, many of them were drinking Chardonnay AT A POKER GAME, so I clearly wasn't the gayest guy there.

Me and my lucky/masculine shirt cleared a sweet $12.00 for the night. Ahhh, fabulous riches. Blogs for everyone. It's on me!

We went to bed at around 2:00am that night. My daughter woke me 5 hours later when she literally jumped out of bed and ran in our room. You can hear her coming on our hardwood floors. Silence.... BOOM... ThumpThumpThumpThumpThumpThump. If there were some sort of Olympic triple-jump-esque event that involved waking , jumping, and sprinting, my daughter would kick serious ass. It may be the steroids.

We came downstairs, with me bleary-eyed and sluggish, and her all amped up about spending another day on this planet as a five year-old. So, what do an exhausted dad and his boundless daughter do at 7:00am on a glorious Sunday? We played poker. She, of course, slaughtered me. I blame the steroids.

In my defense, however, let the record show that I was not still wearing my lucky shirt.

Also in my defense, let it be known that the white chips were worth $1.00 and the blue chips were worth $10.00. So, really, it was an exercise in base-10 mathematics. Later we introduced the lovely $100 purple chips. Extra credit!

Sometimes parenting is found in the nooks and crannies of a hung-over day.

Anyway, we spent the rest of our card-playing hours that day playing games like Old Maid and Uno. Uno is my daughter's current favorite game. The object of the game is to get rid of all the cards in your hand. When you play your second-to-last card, you have to call out "Uno" before you put it down. If you fail to do so, and another player notices, you have to pick up two extra cards.

My daughter LIVES to catch me forgetting to say Uno. If I fail to utter that phrase, she'll leap to her stubby feet as my hand leaves the card behind, triumphantly point her tiny index finger at me, and scream at the top of her lungs, "YOU FORGOT TO SAY UNO!". This is followed by much hooting and cackling. This sequence of events happens surprisingly often.

Although I fail as a parent when it comes to teaching her how to be a good sport, I look forward to her end-zone dances should she ever play football.

And frankly, even the worst game of Uno still beats our old standby of playing baby fish and daddy fish, or baby sandstorm and daddy sandstorm, or whatever stupid noun would be stuck in her head that day. Thankfully she did stick to nouns though. Adverbs would have kicked my ass.