Posts Tagged ‘family’

It has been a particularly fine and sunny day today, and we took the kids back to the “castle park” in Carbondale, IL again and had a wonderful time. I am always fascinated and rejuvinated by this place. And I love watching my kids enjoy themselves there.

The slideshow below is a set of pictures from last summer, not from today, but they’ll still give you a good idea if you’d like to explore the place. Here’s a link to a blog post I did last summer with more info about the park, too.

This post was going to be about a new digital painting that I’ve completed and I was going to show it off here, but that can wait until this evening. The painting is done and waiting in my Picasa Web Album, but as I was about to embed it here on the Monkey, I got a phone call.

My aunt in Michigan was on the other end of the phone, sobbing. MY first thought was … Oh, no, now Grandma is sick, or worse.

But no. Apparently a little while ago, a package arrived via FedEx containing my father’s ashes.

My sister stepped up. She sent the ashes to Michigan, as we hoped, and as my father wanted. His remains get to be where he wants them to be. This is good.

There is a slight personal gut-punch in this for me, and that is, after all the messages I left, and the cards I mailed to my sister, asking her to contact me so we could talk about Dad’s ashes, she has never replied to me. She DID send the ashes, and that’s a win, and I’m happy. But my kid sister has my number, address, and obvious effort on my part to reach her … and has not reciprocated.

But I’ll take what we have. The outcome may not be as nice for me personally as I was hoping, but the outcome overall is achieved. We’ll have Dad’s remains to spread at his memorial in Michigan sometime next month. Something tangible to say goodbye, and my aunt and grandmother satisfied.

My kids + the crazy weather = a great excuse to really build a good solid snow-dude. I’ve helped the kids build a couple of piddly ones over the past few winters, but Louisville rarely provides the amount and/or quality of snow to really make a big, sturdy, memorable one. Well this week we have plenty of snow and an extended series of days with temps just below freezing, so I got a chance to help the guys build a really cool snowman. So much more fun than shoveling driveways and dislodging stuck cars (although I did that too.)

Time for a post that I’ve actually written myself, eh? Is it about roleplaying or VAM or geeky stuff? Nope. It’s about my father’s cremated remains.

I’ve been IM-ing and Facebook-commenting to several interested parties over the past few days about this, so I finally figured out that maybe it would be appropriate to just write a detailed post about it, since I’ve been dragging many of you into this miasma with various tweets and such. Read the rest of this entry »

I love it when a plan comes together!

Earlier today after Cartographer got home from school, the boys were having fun wrestling around the living room with couch pillows. I was cleaning the kitchen but keeping an eye and two ears out for them, and I heard them take their “game” into an interesting direction – essentially, they were taking turns putting each other in jail by having the prisoner sit on the couch with a pillow as the jail cell door and the other kid would use another pillow as the lock. They went at this for a bit, and then I noticed that, as you might expect, the game of pretend was starting to take on a tone of conflict.

You know, “I locked you up!” “No, I broke out!” “No you didn’t, you’re still in jail!”, etc. It started to escalate.

Enter Daddy.

Did I tell them to knock it off? Did I get all parental on them?

Nope. What I did was, I said, “You know guys, when I play the games I like to play with my friends, we usually decide stuff like this by rolling dice. You can have the prisoner roll dice to see if they have enough skill to break out of jail.”

C-man ran to the playroom with a big smile on his face and came back with a rubbery-squeezy baseball-sized six-sider that we have. He says “Okay, if it’s one, two or three, the prisoner breaks out. If it’s four, five, or six, then he has to stay in jail for a minute.”

And WildLion laughs, and they start playing the same game, but with the die helping them decide if the breakout is successful. And they kept at it for another twenty minutes or so, with no arguments or disagreements. Just lots of laughing.

It is a thing of beauty, I tell you, to see my kids embracing the basics of my hobby. And to see my hobby helping them learn stuff. Awesome.

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Now playing: Arcade Fire – Black Mirror
via FoxyTunes

Today’s waypoint is a milestone.

My kids and I played a very basic game of Heroscape last Sunday, and then yesterday, we tried a short game of Heroclix. I was just testing the waters to see if the guys – especially my 6-year-old, Cartographer – were ready. Cartographer is off school this week for Fall Break, so I figured this would be a good time to bust out all this game stuff I’ve had sitting in my closet for years. Well, C-man proved totally ready. The Heroclix thing with the clix dials and the superpowers and all that stuff totally grabbed him. He got it, and he liked it.

Today after we dropped our 3-year-old, WildLion, off at preschool, C-man asked if we could play Heroclix when we got home – but he thought it would be cool to use the HeroSCAPE terrain pieces with the HeroCLIX figures. So, together we built a cool 3-D play area, then started choosing our hero teams. Cartographer – with no prompting or input from me – chose a team of Batman, Robin, Batgirl, Huntress, Black Canary, and Blue Beetle. I was impressed with his Gotham-themed core team, so I naturally went with a team full of Bat-villains: Joker, Harley Quinn, Poison Ivy, Catwoman, Riddler, and Penguin.

I started the game by angling for high ground with Riddler, who has a good ranged attack, and throwing Joker right at his rival mano-a-mano.

I’m not so good at strategy games. I admit it. But I was playing a six-year-old kid who’d only played once before.

But his math-wiz spatial-cognition brain totally grokked the game, and he whupped me. He really, really whupped me.

And I was SOOOO happy about it.

C-man gets gaming, and he likes it. I’ve got a competent gamer on my hands.

Pride Swelleth Over!

Originally published at TGTMB. Please leave any comments there.

My guys and I worked together on a project where we took an old beat-up black hat and turned it into a shiny emblem to honor our favorite rpg design house – Evil Hat Productions.

Here are a few pics of the result…

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