It has been a month in the year of our Coronavirus. The days certainly blur together, even more than usual. I have gotten back into board games, and have spent most of my free time either building or playing games. I have not been in the mood to write at all but I need to get back to it.
Today we had an Easter Egg Hunt for one. Fortunately, we had leftover eggs and dyes from last year. We filled them with various toys and trinkets I’d collected over the past months, as well as coupons with things like “CHOCOLATE MILK!!” and “20 minutes tablet game!” I also included the Who’s in that Egg? tiny zines.
I really like the tiny zines. I’d like to see more in that format, or maybe come up with something that has a few extra pages.
After seeing cousins with tablets, and having classmates who allegedly have phones (I am highly skeptical of this claim), Minnow has been asking for a tablet and/or phone for months now. One of the projects I’ve been working on is making my old smartphone kid-friendly so Minnow can play games on it. I spent a decent amount of time on this, but we ultimately decided the phone wasn’t a good fit for a lot of reasons and it would be better if we just let Minnow use our tablet with supervision.
I’ll probably to continue to tinker with the phone and hopefully upgrade Android so I can add better-quality apps. My current phone doesn’t have magnetic compass but this one does, so it would be useful as a GPS device for when I’m out hiking or whatever.
Each night before bed, if all the chores are done, Minnow gets to play what they call “spider game” (Pikuniku). It’s a puzzle adventure game and they have gotten really into it. It has helped develop their hand-eye coordination tremendously, and it displays the button you need to interact with any given object or character which is incredibly helpful. It requires reading so at least one of us needs to be present to read the dialogue boxes. We all sat down to watch Minnow play tonight and it was a lot of fun, so it reinforced the idea that making device/game time more of a family event would be a good thing.