Force of Will

One of the things that really strikes me as a parent is how precious "alone time" is. I love my video games, my scifi/geek movies, my gaming stuff, but I love my family more - so they take priority and that is right.

But when I get those couple of hours, man do I want to sink my teeth into some PS3 game that's been sitting around for a while and lose hours to it. If there's an active book, it gets devoured in the wee-hours in the space of a week, two if it's really big.

But then there are moments when the two come together. And those are great.

Marcus loves swordfighting. So getting that 20 minutes of running around the house with Nerf swords is a proud papa-geek moment. Especially watching him learn/imitate "moves" like spinning around for no good reason and grabbing my blade so he can swing away freely. Pure awesome.

Alya may not like the fighting, but she loves the story. Tonight the three of us watched Star Wars Episode One - The Phantom Menance. (Sasha was off at the annual xmas cookie exchange.) Marcus was not interested for most of the middle of the movie. But he got a kick out of the good action sequences. Alya paid attention throughout most of the movie. She wanted to know who Anakin was (they've both watched a lot of Clone Wars) and thought that Obi Wan looked funny. And Queen Amidala confused her so much, that I paused the movie to try and explain what was going on. She really wanted to know what was going on.

My squirrel is also the one who like to play Peggle on the computer - but wants someone in the room with her. Alya really "gets" computers and can use a mouse and a touch pad with great ease. Marcus, well he was kind of hitting the keys a lot today, just to try and get something to happen. The two of them may play like a couple of peas in a pod, but they are quite different.

And each day they impress me more.

Be seeing you,

Jon