playful parenting

we didn't start too pleasantly. i let chana choose how many pesukim she wanted. they seemed not too complicated (though a bit long) and i figured we would do 4. after the first one chana got kind of grouchy and didn't really understand it. i had also decided to let her choose chazara, and she chose the shortest aliya. i felt she should do only 10 min of one she didn't know as well, but she said she needs review of that one, too. so we stopped after 2 pesukim and moved on to chazara. once we were there (it went pretty quickly), i decided to review the rashis on those pesukim. chana protested and kind of jokingly said, "don't make me use the force." in a darth vader voice. i have been reading playful parenting by lawrence cohen, and i've been looking for ways to lighten things up with my 10 yr old. (by the way, i attempted to use pretzels as drumsticks when we took a small break to get a snack which jack found highly entertaining and chana said, "i'm not really finding this funny."). anyway, when chana started reading the rashi, with this book in mind, i started choking. chana was shocked; she thought jack was choking me. i said she used the force on me because she was doing the rashis she didn't want to do. she found this hilarious and reenacted it with me starting the translation and her choking. she complimented me on being extremely dramatic and it did lighten the tone and we finished in a good mood.