It’s OK, you can admit it. You don’t even have to hide it, at least not in my house. Just don’t get too carried away. Remember that you have to share 
As part of my experiment to not be so ‘distracted by life‘ – the computers have been turned off after school. This has caused my family to look at each other and say, “Now what?”. Seriously, we’ve had to re-learn how to interact with each other, find some common ground to keep everyone happy. Here’s the Carson family breakdown:
- I’ve learned that Claudia likes to sing, dance, do art projects, or play games
- I’ve learned that Clayton likes to do whatever it is that Claudia is doing – or thwart her in some way (OK – that’s not really anything new…), he likes to play with his cars, but is not so good at playing games yet
- I’ve learned that, in lieu of the computer, Eric prefers to read, or cook – he’ll play games if we twist his arm
- I’ve also learned that I very much enjoy the art projects, particularly when they are directed by Claudia, and that while I like to witness the singing and dancing – I’m not a fan of actually participating in it (that’s just a fact). Some games are good – especially Mancala or Uno.
- The intersection of our interests happens to be… well, let me draw you a graph…
I know it’s complicated, so I’ll give you the cliff notes. It’s trains…
Which brings me back to my introductory comment. I admit it, I like playing with the trains. Specifically, I like the challenge of designing a great new track with the limited resources that we have. Turns out, we’re curve limited. No matter what the track configuration – we always wish we had more curved pieces. I suppose that it’s probably a self-fulfilling prophecy though – if we had more curved track – we’d need more straight track and so on and so forth. Besides, what kind of challenge would there be if we did have more curves?
The rules are this: build a track with as few dead ends as possible – and make sure that your train can travel both clockwise and counter-clockwise around it. That’s easier said than done – I have a new appreciation for real track building engineers out there. Let me give you a few examples: (yes, we’re nerdly, we’ve been proudly photo-documenting them)
It’s a great family past time – but Eric and I have been so into this – that we build tracks now – without the kids (or at least continue to build them after the kids have lost interest). Sometimes we even have to convince one of the kids that the track really should go in a different direction – I constantly reminding myself that we have to share the tracks with them. I guess there’s just something inherently possessive about a good toy… I should remember that lesson.
Have you found your common interest with your kids? Can’t wait for Clayton to be old enough for the legos
Related Posts: Distracted by life…
The parallels here are eerie. We got a train set for the girls for Christmas. One guess as to who spends the most time building elaborately laid out tracks with elevated sections and twists and turns and crazy stuff. You geologists are all the same!
Ha! Eric and I were just discussing this morning how we should give each section of track a point value – so that we can actually rank our tracks… taking it too far….