Playing Games

My boy is really enjoying his EYC group at the church.  Even though the girls outnumber the boys by a fairly wide margin (a fact he will appreciate in a few years!), everyone gets along.  ZBoy discovered early on that he and some of the girls shared a love of anime tv shows and movies and they would swap suggestions for movies to watch.  Z had actually seen quite a few and watched the ones the girls recommended as well.  They are friends.

After the Good Friday service, the EYC kids gathered in the parish hall to fill bags for the Easter egg hunt on Sunday.  As things wound down, one of the girls went up on the little stage and started doing cartwheels and singing.  My boy was standing next to me and he is head snapped up as she sang.  Mine whipped around as well.  He walked up to the stage and asked.... Is that the endsong to Portal?  She stood up after a cartwheel and asked...  Do you KNOW that game? 

Oh, yeah!!!!

In fact, it's one of the boy's favorites.  Another thing to have in common with his new friends.

He bought Portal2 with his birthday money and loved that one as well.  The girls will be so jealous.

I can barely watch him play - it's just dizzying to me.  But I love the concept.

We've been spending a bit of time in the game store lately.  So many shoot-em-up games with various levels of gore.  Killing "enemies" left and right.  I don't mind the ones where they are shooting robots or menacing aliens, but the ones that pit people against people or people against animals are very disturbing to me.  There are a few fantasy games that feature skimpy costumes and dragons which I guess aren't so bad.  But I really don't feel that these are appropriate for kids.  What are we teaching them with this?

My son pleads - But everybody else plays these games! - but I feel like they desensitize him to the very real harm that guns can do to people.  There's one game that my husband has been playing that makes him receive repeated shots to the head by an alien when he dies.  It's awful to look at.  My son doesn't even blink. 

I believe my son understands the difference between these games and reality.  His uncles and granddad love to shoot guns at family get-togethers (shooting range at the farm) and he never wants to go down there.  It hurts his ears.  He has a very strong survival instinct and stays away from stuff that might hurt him.  But I wonder about other kids who play these games.  Do they understand that when someone gets shot, they don't come back after a few seconds with a full health-meter?  That dead means you don't get back up to continue the game?  What if he goes to play at someone's house one day and that other kid doesn't understand the difference between those games and reality?  It is one of my biggest fears.

That's why I love the Portal games.  They are puzzles where the character has to get from one place to another, accomplish one thing or another.  The characters are interesting and fun.  I wish there were more games like that, which ARE appropriate for kids my son's age.  Sure, the story involves some questionable experimentation by a big company that uses its employees as test subjects, but the object is to overcome.  Not to kill or maim, but to figure out how to overcome the obstacles.  I can get behind that.

And of course, the endsongs when they run the game credits really are awesome. 

Enjoy!

Fun Monday - Should I Stay or Should I Go

Roger is a glutton for punishment - he just hosted April's Fun Monday and now he's going for May too!  He poses this challenge for the first Monday of May:
Let us discuss what kind of plans we have for the summer season. With the economy, and gas prices being what they are, will you be traveling during the summer months or staying close to home?

Summer is our "dry" time.  Starting in the fall, my husband works freelance sports in addition to his regular job, so we have a little extra money coming in.  We take care of things like new tires for the car, maintenance on AC system or replacing a dead appliance.  There always seems to be something that sucks that extra money up.  But because I won't make my husband do golf, summer has very little going on in the extra work area.  Which means we don't have any extra money to so stuff.  My son used to go to camp in the summer, but we can't swing that anymore.  So my husband and I take turns being home with him.  Usually, he goes to work in the morning and I work at home, then at lunch time, we switch.  This summer looks to be about the same.

Some things will be different.  Both my boy and I are on the heavy side now, so this will be the summer of "de-pudging".  We will ride our bikes wherever we can.  Our diet is going to be VERY basic.  We'll spend more time moving and less time sitting in front of various screens.  And there will be an emphasis on decluttering - selling what we can and donating the rest.

Needless to say, we won't be going anywhere except perhaps the guys will go camping somewhere.  We'd love to actually take a trip together, but finances advise against it.  Summer is our most difficult time in that respect.  One day, I'd love to take my guys to England and Wales.  Or we could take our boy out West to see some really different land.  Or up to the northeast to check out Maine and upstate New York.  But those trips will have to wait - for lower gas prices, vacation time, and healthier pocketbooks. 

To see what other people are doing this summer, go visit Roger!

Another Birthday Cake Experiment

Today we did the family celebration for ZBoy's birthday.  Both sets of grandparents were invited over, along with his friend William.  And even though Z requested a strawberry rhubarb pie from Village Inn as his "cake", I didn't think there would be enough pie to go around - so I decided to try making this cake.  It's one of those giant cupcake forms made out of silicone.  (I did NOT use the filler insert.)

I've never cooked with a silicone form before...  they really emphasized spraying the "non-stick" form with cooking spray thoroughly before filling.  Guess that's what makes it non-stick, huh?  Anyway, I whipped up some cake batter, filled the bottom part up to the fill line and put the rest in the "top" portion.  I put it in the oven as directed and when they came out, they were VERY poofy.  I think I cut off about a third of the cake to make it level for stacking together...

When I unmolded them, I had to laugh.  I had half of Madonna's bra from her scary pointy bra phase and the Elephant Man's nose.  Somehow I don't think that's how it was supposed to turn out.  I'm not sure what I did wrong, as I followed all the directions.  The sides of the cake were also pretty crusty.  Like they were overdone - but it had to cook that long to be done all the way through.  I even turned the temperature down and cooked it like a bundt cake, so it shouldn't have done that...

The cake molds come with a little insert that gives you all kinds of decorating ideas.  Most of them left me feeling a bit squirmy - I don't really go for cutesy elephants or puppy dogs... and my circus cake looks MUCH better than theirs.  I had a can of vanilla icing and a can of chocolate.  I thought I'd do the bottom part white.  Looks a bit like a yurt, doesn't it?  Just needs a little door.  It was a good start though.

I still had some leftover red from last week's circus cake, so I figured what the heck...  No actual design in mind here;  just  round and round the cake-i-go theme.  Perhaps it looks like a bomb, or a target from the top.  To me, it didn't look like anything...

I guess it didn't have to look like anything.  It got eaten.  Z said, "This is the hardest cake I've ever eaten...  but it tastes really good!"  Ah, damned with faint praise.  Delicious, but not tasty, as I used to tell my own mother.  I'm not sure I'd ever do this cake again.  Maybe I just need more practice with silicone molds, or a different cake mix - or a different oven.  The one I have?  Well, setting a temperature is kind of a crap shoot.  Sometimes 25 degrees lower than your intended temperature is right, and sometimes it's 50.  But if the recipe calls for 350 and you set it at 350, you'll be eating charcoal briquets.

Still, a worthy experiment.