Video Games

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!