Crisis Action Parents are GO!

I was afraid the neighbors were going to call the police.

It was 3:20 AM. The lights were on all over the house. And my five year-old was screaming “No! It hurts! Why are you doing this?”

She had a sliver in the sole of her foot. It was a quarter-inch long, cruel and black and buried too deep to grab even with tweezers. She’d been hobbling on it all day, refusing to let anyone get near it. She preferred the pain she knew to the unknown suffering of someone trying to dig it out.

“Let her sleep on it,” I’d said. “She’s too tired to be reasonable right now. I’ll get it in the morning.”

At 3:00, she woke up howling. Her ear hurt, she said. It’s been a while since the Age of Interminable Ear Infections, but fine, we know how to deal with such things.

And then she was throwing up and crying and trying not to throw up. My wife and I were gathered around her in the bathroom like some sick cheering squad. (“Let it out! Let it out! Waaay out!”) We couldn’t help but notice the slight red swelling around the sliver in her foot.

“Do you think…?”

“She doesn’t have a fever.”

“But still…”

“Okay. I’ll get the tweezers.”

My wife held our daughter down on her bed in a WWE-style hold. I grabbed the offending foot and hoped the other one didn’t break my nose. Once we got going, it took maybe three minutes to work the splinter out. They were among the longest three minutes of my life. (Right up there with Anakin’s “sand” scene from Episode II.)

“Got it,” I said.

Daughter stopped crying. She was fine, she said. Foot was fine, stomach was fine, ear was fine. The crisis was over.

And no one called the police.

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June 25, 2010 | No Comments »

Don’t look at me. I don’t teach ‘em this stuff.

Last night, while Thing One was taking her bath, Thing Two stepped into the bathroom and asked, in her broken three year-old English, “Do you want to see something sad?”

“Okay,” said Thing One.

Thing Two produced three Powerpuff Girls dolls and a stuffed poodle. She arranged the four toys on the bathroom floor, each lying on its back (the poodle’s legs sticking up in the air), then joined them on the floor. She lolled her head and stuck her tongue out.

“We’re dead,” she said, and closed her eyes.

“I’ll always remember you,” said Thing One with a fake sob.

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October 5, 2008 | No Comments »

And so it begins

My daughters have taken to playing games with me in the evenings this week. On Tuesday, we played Landlock. Last night, we played it again, this time using some of the rules. Tonight, they requested Candyland.

“Remember when I used to play with Candyland with the zombie dogs?” asked Thing One, who is six. I assured her I did.

“We should use a zombie dog,” she continued. “It can go down the path and try to eat the other players.”

House rules? With zombies? I was proud. With just a few questions from me, she worked out her own system for integrating a zombie dog into Candyland.  And so it gives me great pleasure to present Thing One’s Zombie Dog Variant:

  • One player controls the dog.
  • The other players each receive three bullet tokens.
  • During the dog player’s turn, she moves the dog to the next purple space.
  • If that space is occupied by another player’s pawn (aka “gingerbread man”), that player can fight the dog off by spending a bullet. If that player has no bullets left, his pawn is removd from the game and he is elminated from the game.
  • If the dog player eliminates all the other players, she is the winner.

(After playing with these rules, I would suggesting modifying them so the dog doesn’t have to land exactly on the pawn, but can attack while “moving over” it, which will increase the quantity of zombie dog attacks.)

Yup. Pretty proud.

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August 7, 2008 | No Comments »

Pedals

I was winded. My back was starting to ache. And I was wondering how much longer I could keep running up and down the block, pushing my daughter on her new bike and keeping her from falling over.

“You have to pedal,” I reminded her. I suspected my groaning frame was providing most of the thrust, and her feet were just sitting on the pedals, going round for the ride.

“I am pedaling.”

“Good, good.” I didn’t have the breath for much more encouragement. And she was pedaling. The bike was moving faster now; I had to run faster too.

I thought back to when I was my daughter’s age, sitting on my first bike, and how my father had run behind me, one hand on my back and the other on the bicycle seat. Was he winded, I wondered. Did he pause at the end of block, huffing and wheezing, before turning the bike around? If so, I didn’t remember. What I did remember were the important moments: crashing into a tree, the terror when I realized he was no longer holding the bike, the exultation when I realized he wasn’t holding the bike and I was riding it on my own.

A glance at my watch gave me a shot of guilty relief: Supper time. Thank God.

“It’s time to go in,” I said. “We’ll practice some more tomorrow.”

“Yeah, I need a break,” said my daughter. “I’m tired from all that pedaling.”

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May 6, 2008 | No Comments »

Journey to Brightwood

My five year-old daughter (aka “Thing One”) has taken yet another step on the path to becoming a full-fledged gamer. She’s touched on board games, miniatures (well, a stripped-down version of Heroscape), and now she’s tasted roleplaying games.

We played Faery’s Tale from Firefly Games. We didn’t really use the system (it’s too complicated for a kid whose just started kindergarten), but embraced most everything else: the fairy tale “Brightwood” setting, the different types of fairies, and the fairy social system (which I think is one of the coolest parts of the game).

Thing One chose to play a Brownie, which meant she worked in a peasant’s cottage, could turn invisible, and work simple “household magic” (i.e., simple repairs and construction). She named her Brownie “Lena,” which is actually one of most normal names she’s made up. For our first outing, I kept it simple, so it was the two of us playing on a Saturday afternoon while everyone else was napping.

It turns out my daughter is like me in that she can’t roleplay sitting down. We started at the dining room table, but she didn’t really get into it until she got to feet and started essential LARPing the scene. Whenever the scene changed, she’d lead us into another room: the living room was the forest where she freed a fellow fairy from a spider’s web; the kitchen was a clearing outside the night-troll’s cave; the basement, of course, was the troll’s lair.

My proudest moment (in a session full of proud moments) was when Lena tricked the troll into walking into the sunlight (and turning to stone) by secretly moving his clock ahead. In true gamer fashion, after I described the scene of the troll’s lair, Thing One asked, “Does he have a clock?” So yes, of course he did.

Overall, it was a fantastic experience for both of us. I was impressed with my daughter’s creativity and imagination, and she had a blast with her fairy tale adventure. The game took a little over an hour, which seemed about right. Thing One’s still a bit short on the attention span, and nap time runs two hours at the longest, so it’s best to keep these things short.

Most importantly, she’s looking forward to playing again. And to tell you the truth, so am I.

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October 15, 2007 | No Comments »