Play Time

Mom’s sick. T’s sick. Dad’s still healthy…so far.

T and I have been sick. A cold, the flu, who knows. (Well, now we know T currently has a double ear infection, and definitely not the flu.) And when I say I’ve been sick, I mean I can’t remember the last time I was this fatigued, coughing, congested, sore and achy and just flat out miserable. Thankfully, T has not had all of my symptoms. I’ve had so many blog ideas in the past ten days but no energy to actually type them up.

But a few minutes ago, I discovered something that I simply could not go without blogging and sharing with all of you who check in to our little place in the world wide web.

There I was laying in bed somewhere in between sleep and consciousness watching a show on my computer. T, I thought, had finally settled on the couch watching Dinosaur Train (his cartoon of choice for our sick time – we’ve seen every episode available on Netflix…twice, I think.) Then he comes into my room and my mom-radar kicks in and I’m awake again.

me: “What’s up, buddy?”

T: “Nothing. I think you should stay in bed until the clock says 8 – 4 – 0”

me: “um, that’s actually a really long time and will be past your bedtime. What’s up?”

T: “Nothing, I just think you should stay in bed until the clock says, um, 6 – 2 – 0”

My intuition kicks in and it dawns on me that T doesn’t want me to get up for a reason. I think he’s snuck out some snacks or something. I get out of bed and he immediately tries to keep me from leaving the room. I’m laughing because, surely this is a game of some sort… Then, I reach the door way and see the following. Intake of breath and immediate covering of my mouth – I back up and get the camera.

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Just in case you can’t quite see the reasoning behind this colossal mess and misuse of good toilet paper: he made train tracks for his trains.

One day when he’s older and has a preschool age child who makes a huge mess, I will dig up these pictures and laugh hysterically at his whines. Until then, he has until the clock reads “5-3-0” to finish playing and then it all gets trashed.

Categories: Growing Pains, Learning, Play Time, Tarleton, Thomas the Train | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

Merry Christmas from the Thiessens!

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This year we were lucky enough to celebrate Christmas all together and decided to have a little fun with our Christmas photo. 😉 Our good friend Stephanie was nice enough to help us out and we can not say Thank You enough for her dealing with our crazy selves!

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This year’s Santa picture is a far cry from last year’s! T was happy to tell Santa that he wanted new Thomas trains and then informed Santa that he saw Santa give the little girl before him some candy, so … where was his?

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Right after Santa came and after all the presents were unwrapped.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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It was a Thomas and Dinosaur filled Christmas for this little guy! I loved catching him playing with the new toys.

Hope you all had as much fun celebrating the Holidays with your loved ones.

Categories: Christmas, Dinosaurs, Family Time!, Play Time, Tarleton, Thomas the Train | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

The sleeping dragon…

We’ve woken a sleeping dragon. Two of them actually. One is play doh and the other is video games.

At the beginning of the week T played with his new play doh for about 45 mins each day. 45 whole minutes!!! BY HIMSELF! Yes, I help him open the lids of the colors he wants and I check in on him regularly (play doh in our house is only played with outside of the house.) I even let him use my rolling pin because he thinks it makes play doh even cooler to play with…

But play-doh isn’t the only thing T discovered this week, he also discovered Super Mario Bros. Ok, he discovered them a couple of weeks ago when we were searching through our rather vast collection of Wii games for something he could play (i.e. an Elmo game that TEACHES while he plays – shocking how good he is at it…but I digress). I loved Mario Bros when I was younger. It was pretty much the only Nintendo games I could play and I remember whining to my parents that my brothers wouldn’t share the Nintendo with me because  by the time I could play Mario they had beaten it and thought it was boring and lame. (AND no one wanted to play Mario Kart with me because I would get REALLY upset when they beat me EVERY.SINGLE.TIME.)

Point is, I get T’s new infatuation. I get it. But it has become somewhat of an obsession, overnight. And that worries Dave and me. I’m talking “NOOOO I can’t go to sleep because we need to save the princess” kind of fits. “NOOOOOO I don’t want to stop playing and do something else.” But here’s the thing – T isn’t the one playing, I am. The game is essentially Super Mario Bros but newer and more complicated and more computerized. You hold the Wii remote as you would the old school remote and that does make it easier for a 3 year old, but the fact remains that the game is above his level. (Elmo isn’t!!) So Mommy plays. Mommy has calluses forming on her thumbs because she hasn’t played video games in so long. Mommy has been giving in to playing for 30 minute stretches because that old obsessive “must.beat.this.level.before.I.stop.” has kicked in. (I’m not joking about how much I loved playing Mario…)

Playing games with your child is good. But we’ve been really happy with how well rounded Teddy has been, naturally, with the things he enjoys doing. He loves being outside, getting a little dirty, helping in everything we do, building blocks, etc. He loves his LeapPad, but has *on his own* stopped playing and gone to do something else non-computerized.

Yesterday evening after I decided my thumbs couldn’t take any more, I decided that we would simply have to create new boundaries with this new “video game” discovery. I figure, if we start from now, he’ll learn from now that sitting all day long trying to beat a video game is not okay.

This all started when I remember we had all these games and Dave found a racing car one and got obsessed for a few days and T played with him a few times. T-Rex asked for the race car game and we found a Cars one but that was too hard and then he saw this colorful Mario one…and I thought, well Mario is harmless (as far as bad words and violence go) so why not (because I LOVED Mario so much as a kid) and now…ugh.

He’s not awake yet and I just know the first thing he’s going to say after “Good Morning” is “Mommy we have to beat the monster and save the princess!!”

*Update: he woke up almost exactly as I typed that and said: “I woke up mommy. Can we play Mario and save the princess now?”

Oy.

Mario Time!

Categories: Family Time!, Learning, Play Time, Tarleton, Video Games | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

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