Gamers

I can be, and this probably comes as shock to absolutely no one, a bit competitive. 

I like to win.  I sincerely enjoy beating you - whether at a game of Scrabble or by a hundredth of a second in a race.  Simply put, winning feels good.  Really good.  Even though quite often I don't win when I think I should (in the only marathon I ever ran my friend and training partner beat me somehow by one second, I still contest the results).

In the years right after college there were many lazy, before kids and real life, Sundays that I would spend playing Trivial Pursuit and drinking mimosas with my people.  We would laugh and play and be amazed at our ability to know things after so my delicious bubbly cocktails.  We would order in food and often not even leave the house (unless we ran out of champagne).
More often than not at some point during our game my competitive streak would start to show - if the answer to a question was plural and you forgot the "s" or, god forbid, the answer was possessive (Thomas Jefferson's) and you didn't answer in the possessive tense (Thomas Jefferson) there was no way I was giving you credit for your answer.  If we were playing Scrabble and I was losing badly I would claim there was an earthquake and shake the board to disrupt the tiles (yes, I was, at the time, well over the age of five).

Seriously, I was super fun to play with, or so I thought.  At some point, and don't remember when (although I am sure my friends can clearly recall), I realized I was not so fun to play with. 
I was annoying and ridiculous. 
So, over the years I have blunted my competitive edge.  I try to enjoy the game and the people and the time spent together, not just the end result of having been victorious. 

But it still simmers beneath the surface.  It still bubbles up when I am losing badly, or at the sidelines of one of the girls' sporting events, and I try actively to push it down.

This trait, however, I have unfortunately passed along to my kids.  Not in sports, they don't care if they win or lose (much to my dismay) but in game playing :

Headbandz, Beat the Parents, Memory, Go Fish, Fairy Queen, Sequence... I hear all sorts of trash talking from my nine and four year old.  Addison loves to gloat rather emphatically when winning and Brenna has informed all of us that it's "no fun unless you win".  Apparently, without even trying I managed to pass along one of my many flaws.

Eh, I guess it's just one of the many things I am bound to wrong over the next decades of parenting....