The Drawing

      Nicholas could spend hours in his room playing.  His mommy thought it was wonderful when he finally became interested in playing imaginatively with toys like a little boy should.   Whenever she looked for him he was always playing under his bed, which she found odd…but who was she to complain?  He was quiet and happy and had left the video games alone in favor of his LEGOS.  That was a win in her book.

  

       One day while Nicholas was in his room he drew a picture with a big circle in the center coloring it in bold strokes with a black crayon.  Dragons danced around the hole shooting fire from their mouths and the sun shone down from the sky in his picture.  When he was done with it, he quickly lost interest tossing it aside.   

 

      Later he crawled under his bed to retrieve his Spiderman LEGO mini figure and noticed that it was lying on top of the crumpled dinosaur drawing broken in half!  His heart clenched in his chest and tears started to well in his eyes as he grabbed for his favorite.  To his shock when he pulled the mini figure away from the paper he discovered it was intact.  There were no missing parts after all, but how could that be? Perplexed he quickly pulled the crumpled drawing from under the bed.   Weird, he must have imagined it. 

      He retrieved his box filled with mini figures and decided to pretend the circle was a black hole in space sucking everything in proximity into its depths.  He dropped the soldier onto the black circle and freaked out when it disappeared before his very eyes.   He quickly turned the sheet of paper over and shook it, and miraculously the figure dropped out onto the floor.  At this point he was intrigued and ready to conduct some more experiments with his toys when all of a sudden the figure began to twitch.  At least he thought it moved!

    At that very moment Mommy called him to dinner.  He didn’t want to EAT at a time like this, but if he told anyone they would never believe him.  They would think he was lying.  Still he decided to drop a couple other figures into the circle and quickly hid it under the bed until after supper.   He was trying desperately to make sense of it all.  He was eager to finish supper and return to his room to see what other surprises awaited him there. 

      After supper he discovered when he retrieved his figures from the circle they had come to life.  They literally walked around and talked to him and to each other.  They seemed terrified of him at first because of his size, but then they realized that he was their friend and encouraged him to enter into the circle with them.  He was a bit afraid of what would happen if he tried it.  Certainly he couldn’t fit inside the circle.  It was small and he was big.  Instead he dipped his hand inside the circle and was terrified when something sharp grabbed it and wouldn’t let go.     “Mommy!” he screamed hysterically.  Mommy ran into the room horrified by the bizarre site that met her eyes.     Whatever was inside the drawing had ahold of his hand and wouldn’t let go!  

        Nicholas’s LEGO figures seemed to be jumping up and down and trying to tell her what to do to help.   Even though the whole situation was beyond bizarre, she rushed to do their bidding.  Quickly she gathered slices of cheese and placed them on the black circle on the piece of paper.   The cheese disappeared and released Nicholas’s hand.   She held him tightly as he sobbed in terror completely overwhelmed by the entire experience.    As she watched the LEGO mini figures transform back into plastic toys, “she waited for someone to tell her what to do next.”

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Last Game I Played

NaBloPoMo asks :

“What was the last game you played?”

     The last game I played was just last night.  I played a quick game of Creationary with my kids.  It is a wonderful game that combines LEGOS, creativity, a LEGO die you create, and a stack of playing cards that include four distinctive building categories: nature, vehicles, buildings, and things.  With a roll of the die, the category is set, a card is drawn, and it is game on!  Once everyone has completed their creation, each person shows their creation to the others, and the guessing begins. 

       I personally love LEGO games for their flexibility.  Each game includes a rule book with suggestions on game play.  The fun is making your own version.  In my family’s version, we simply are challenged to build what is on the card and then everyone gets a guess.  We are all winners, and the fun comes in the creating and the guessing.

       My kids begged to play three jerks before bedtime last night and I obliged, because that is the kind of mom I am.  What can I say?  I love to play games.  I love the interaction with my kids, and in the case of this game, I love to try to figure out the best way to make my LEGO bricks come to life and magically represent the colorful picture on the card.  All too soon, our beds beckoned.  If only summer vacation was here, the game could have gone on. Unfortunately, there are a couple more weeks of school to endure.  A couple more weeks of waking up at the butt crack of dawn, planners to sign, and papers to Oooo and Ahhh over before we are all granted a reprieve.  What was the last game you played?  Inquiring minds want to know until next time when I give you another glimpse into the life of a trucker’s wife.
       

Creationary Review

     The GBE2 challenge to review something this week had me drawing a blank. I wrote a great review about Eggies and then discovered my friend Jo had already written a brilliant review about the amazing product that allows you to make hard boiled eggs without the shell. Check it out! She did an amazing job? What to write about?? Then it hit me like a ton of bricks…as in LEGO bricks!

     I play a lot of games with my kids and this Christmas I got another one called “Creationary”. Creationary is a LEGO game and is fun and engaging for the whole family. The best thing about LEGO games is that the rules are more guidelines or actual suggestions. You and your family can play the game the way the instructions suggest or modify it to make it your own.

  

   According to the game rules the object of the game is to be the first player to score 5 points by building creations and guessing other players creations. The game comes with a special LEGO dice that you get to assemble, 338 LEGOS in assorted sizes and colors, and 96 cards divided into 3 levels of difficulty: basic, advanced, and expert.

    

        On your turn you roll the dice and carry out the action rolled. The dice has 6 sides which include the building categories nature, vehicles, buildings, things, “X2“, and “?”. If you roll the “X2” you choose the category you would like to build before you pick up a card, tell everyone what category you are building, and then proceed as normal. If an opponent guesses what you are creating you both get double the points. The person who builds gets points and the person who guesses correctly gets points. If you roll a “?”, you get to choose the category to build too. You can keep score by counting the number of “?” on the back of the cards. Building or guessing a creation from a card with 3 “?” earns you 3 points.

     I have found while playing with my kids that the fun part of this game is the building and guessing. Instead of waiting around for each person to have a turn, one person rolls the dice to select the category and then we all take a card and build. When our creation is done, we all guess at what was built. We have abandoned the scoring and the rules regarding the “X2” and “?”.

     I like having the cards to challenge me to build to the best of my ability what is pictured. I like how this game forces you to think, problem solve, and be creative. In my opinion it is a great game to play with the whole family as you build and celebrate each other’s creations.

      As you play, you learn from everyone else on ways to build different things. We may have did away with the rules using the “?” and “X2” spaces and have went off on a tangent on how we play, but the beauty of LEGO games is the freedom it gives you to make the game your own. It forces you to think outside the box and forces you to be creative. After you play it a while, your building and guessing skills get a lot better and your imagination grows by leaps and bounds. You begin to know what blocks to use and how to get the desired look you want. Since we don’t play for points, we are all winners which keep both my kids happy and me sane. That is precisely what my family loves the most about it until next time when I give you another glimpse into the life of a trucker’s wife.