Posts Tagged ‘kids’

MonkeyNet's newest hero team

Finally mining the dregs of the many varieties of possible animated Batman concepts,  MonkeyNet has announced its intent to produce a new Batman series scheduled for Fall 2009 targeted to 4 – 7  year-olds called Batman: The Brave and the Bird, wherin the Caped Crusader will be partnered with an actual talking robin named Drake.

MonkeyNet executives refused to take questions after making the short announcement.

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.

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.)

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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For the second year in a row, we visited my wife Leah’s in-laws over the July 4th holiday weekend. They live in Southern Illinois in a town called Benton. About 40 minutes’ drive from their home, in Carbondale, is one of the most amazing parks I’ve ever seen.

This park is called Jeremy “Boo” Rochman Memorial Park. Jeremy was a teenager who lived in Carbondale and died in an auto accident several years ago. Jeremy was an avid roleplayer and from what I understand, a particular fan of D&D. So, to honor his memory, Jeremy’s parents bought a tract of land near the site of the accident and built him a park. A park with wizards, dragons, and fantasy statuary. A park with a huge, extremely well-built and well-maintained castle. A castle that you can actually go into, wander around in, and enjoy, including secret passages, crawlspaces, towers, thrones, and amazing artwork throughout.

This is how you honor someone who loved the stuff we love. This is how parents who love their geek kid and are not ashamed of his hobby honor a son. This is how adults from all over the place can honor the spirit of myth and imagination and inspire it in their children.

I invite you to peruse the embedded slideshow of images I took over our last two visits to Boo Rochman Park, and also, if you’re so inclined, to follow the links below the slideshow to get more info.

Castle Park, Carbondale IL

The Park Website