Umbrellas

Our children fight in the most bizarre ways.  There is very little "She's looking at me!" or "He's breathing the same air as I am!  Make him stop!"  We all get along fairly well these days.  It's nice.  This morning there was a spat, over the weather and temperature in countries half way round the world.  seriously.

David loves to play Axis and Allies.  He just turned 9.  He's played the game for two years.  He knows geography like no body's business.  Sarah loves roll playing games and to create her own scenarios for them.  She's almost 11 1/2.  She knows well, more then I do about so many different things.  They invented a game yesterday on the eight hour car drive back from Pennsylvania.  It uses the Axis and Allies board, but there are different developing nations that roll to see if it's a good year for herbs, meat, grain, their ports, etc.  I think it is FreeCiv with a role playing twist?  I'm not sure.  They played it for hours in the van.  They played it for hours this morning.  But here is how it ended:

Geography dude claimed that since the cities he was developing in Spain and Ukraine ("For the last time Sarah! It's not Israel!  It's Ukraine!!") were on the same latitude lines he could build similar cities there and use similar material.
Detail oriented, authentic, perfectionist chick could not allow this.  They were in different parts of the world.  There must be different temperatures and climates.

They both were right, but they were not happy to hear that from me, and it did not give them a solution.  I decided the weather might be able to solve this for us.  (We do not argue with the weather in this family.  That rule was set 9 years ago.)  In Spain right now it's in the 60s and there's sun for the next three days.  In the Ukraine in the area where David's settling, it's in the mid-50s with downpours for the next three days.  David is right.  There are similar temperatures.  Sarah is right.  The weather is drastically different, and he may want to consider different materials to accommodate that.  Solution?  Pack extra umbrellas.