8 posts tagged “fun”

I have been doing a lot of crafting lately.  I'll have to get some pictures online to show what I've done lately (cute little mini pinatas, and some super-easy fleece ballet slippers).  But here are things I have in mind for Christmas.  As an alternative to a gingerbread house:

It's based on the cardboard template here: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2007/07/diy_minicomic_stand.html

For gifts, I'm thinking of making three of these for the kids:

Balance beam far away

This seems interesting...

I'm generally not into having my kids design brand logos, but for no good reason, I'm inclined to make an exception for this.  I have no illusions that we'll win, but I think we could have fun with it anyhow.

Since Christmas, my {A} has been really enjoying games.  Both girls have been learning a lot too.  The first game is a quick US geography game:

It's based on a cute book the kids also received for Christmas, by the same name The Scrambled States of America.  We're playing with the "early reader" rules, but using the regular rules, I think it could easily be a fun game for older kids.  The game has two decks of cards, a deck with a card for each of the 50 states, and another deck with cards with everything from "touches the Pacific Ocean" to "Capital has a person's name" to "is red".  Each player has 5 state cards and  their own little map of the US.  My kids carefully find each of "their" states on the map, and they are getting better at it!  Each turn a new card is taken from the second deck.  Each player tries to find a state that matches the new card, sets the matching state in a "home" pile and takes a new state (which my kids diligently look up on their map).  It's cute and fun, and educational too!  Can't argue with that!

The other game we've been playing is called "The Tales of Ulysses".  My husband got it from Tanga.com a few months ago. 

Ulysses

It's a boardgame about the Odyssey.  Yeah, the one by Homer.  In the game, each player tries to get their ship from Troy home to Ithaca, while constantly having to deal with shipwrecks (blowing you wildly off-course), beguilements, fighting various mythical creatures... then, when you FINALLY get to Ithaca, you need to defeat Penolope's suitors.  It  takes a while to play, and at some point I do start hoping SOMEONE will get a little luck so the game can end.  But it got my kids interested in a classic, and my{B} is upstairs reading a kids' version of the Odyssey as I type this.

Whenever I have trouble with my macbook, my husband likes to tease me about my "intuitive" mac.  But now he has to admit it is pretty easy to use-- while I was showering and my husband was "watching the kids", my 21 month old took out my macbook, set it on the coffee table, opened up photobooth, and took some pictures of himself.

I don't want to know what {A} was doing on the sofa behind him, but that's her foot in the first photo.

Watching him, I discovered that he also knows how to make the screen go dark by holding down F1, and then brighten up by holding down F2.  Of course he discovered the cd/dvd eject button quite a while ago.  Fearless experimentation is a powerful learning tool, until someone or something gets hurt.

Here are a couple more photos from this morning:

I love the Elvis smile in the second photo.

We were innocently running errands on Saturday when we glanced in the Target electronics section, and they had Wii game systems, IN STOCK.  I've been looking for one for a few months, and was only finding expensive "bundles", so we grabbed this and ran.

happy gamer

It is LOTS and LOTS of fun.  I haven't played a game system since, hmmm... probably Intellivision in the 80s (before my brother decided to take the game paddles apart AGAIN).