Playing

I got to play with Gideon while Zion was at school today and Elias napped.  I love our one on one time.  Today it was a Wii game.  Something he’s never been interested in before but Rob bought him a Sesame Street game, Cookie’s Counting Carnival (don’t know why it isn’t the Counts Counting Carnival, that would make more sense).  Gideon loved it.  The game came with a Cookie Monster cover for the Wii remote, which Gideon had to turn and scoop and move to play the carnival games.  He also had to jump which he really enjoyed. 

In the spirit of giving a complete review I should say that I was a bit annoyed that the game kept repeating the instructions every time the question wasn’t answered right away.  This is generally a good thing but it happens too frequently and (a big AND) the child can’t play the game while the character is speaking.  So if by then they have figured out what they need to do and want to answer most of the time the game won’t accept it until after the talking is done.  This isn’t something Gideon would understand so he would get a little lost as to what he needed to do.  And on one game the circle that indicates which answer you are selecting is too close in color to the background and is VERY hard to see.

Otherwise, so far as we’ve played it, the games were fun and age appropriate.  Gideon had to count and recognize numbers (which was a bit beyond him but when Zion played after school she had a great time with it) and complete patterns and recognize shapes.  At the end of each game the child wins a golden cookie.  We haven’t played the entire game yet but so far I haven’t seen what good the cookies are.  We’ve played the Carnival section but not the Games section so maybe they are used there. 

Today had some rough patches.  Rob is out of town, Elias doesn’t want to nap, Zion is hyper emotional, Gabe is testing some limits, Rosie has decided she isn’t housebroken, spills, falls, tears, yadda, yadda, yadda…  So I’m finally taking a breather after the kids have gone down for nap and get to play with the photos I took when I was playing with my camera this morning.  There a few that made me smile.  I think one is worthy of the store, we’ll see if I still think so after sitting on it for a few days.  If you’d like to see them (and I think you should) you’ll have to pop over to my Finding Beauty blog.