My Kids Do Not Know How to Have Fun

My wife introduced my kids to the "license plate game" last Friday -- we were driving down Route 130 and she thought it would be good practice for our cross-country trip to try to identify license plates from different states . . . the rule being that you score a point if you are the first person to see a particular state's plate, but little did she imagine the genie she uncorked, as both my children took the game VERY seriously, and this resulted in several arguments, much yelling, some outright cheating (so that we had to introduce a verification corollary rule) and finally, just after I parallel parked the car across from the public lot, to culminate the competition, both my children bolted from the car, ran across the street (without looking both ways, or even one way) darted between cars in the parking lot, and sprinted to a white plate -- "Indiana!"-- and then argued about who yelled it first (resulting in another corollary rule: no playing the game outside the confines of the car) and two days later, on Sunday, when I was driving Ian back from his soccer game, he was still playing, even though he was alone in the back seat and I had informed him that I wasn't playing because I was driving back from an unfamiliar location, but none of this mattered, he was racking up points and soundly beating some imaginary opponent, an imaginary opponent who probably resembled his older brother.