Playing Monopoly, then playing pretend

I spent my Saturday with the neighbor kids so their mom could go to the hospital with grandma, who's having knee surgery. I'd promised Sierra we'd play Monopoly, so we did--at my lovely backyard table, in the sun! We dealt out most of the properties first, which moved the game along nicely. Sierra and Miles have an amazing new updated Monopoly set, where you have a debit card instead of paper money, and the bank is essentially a very small ATM type thing. Also, everything costs a lot more. In the thousands and millions. But it's still Monopoly. We played a whole game, and Miles, the little brother, won. (We made a couple of slightly unorthodox trades that were perhaps more favorable toward him. But. Yeah.) Then I worked on my garden (death to the holly tree stump and the holliettes!) while they climbed my hawthorne tree, and then they played this elaborate game in which they represented closely aligned but different tribes who were waging war on a third tribe. The best part was when Sierra said, "Okay, Miles, now we have to speak to them in a language we all understand," and he said, "No, I'm going to speak my own language." Oh, the older sibling/younger sibling dynamic. But yay for little kids playing make-believe outside. Yes, there's a potentially problematic tribal element, but it wasn't cowboys and Indians, and there was no war-whooping. And there also were not TV show characters involved. Overall, excellent stuff.