Stuff

We call nap time "Tent time" now - Sofi goes into her tent and will stay there voluntarily for a period of time, and sometimes even fall asleep.
"Have a nice tent time," I told her today.
"Have a nice you time," she said back.

As far the heavy hand of the father in the last story, the man-eating nice troll was all Sofi, probably inspired by the fairy tale book she got for Christmas. "Let's have a nice troll," she said. And then later, "The troll is eating people." "Eating people?" I asked. "That doesn't sound very nice. Chewing them up and swallowing them?" She said yes. So we ran with it. The obvious me contribution was "Restaurants are expensive."

The really-stripped-down Universalis - I ask her, "What kind of story?" and she always says, "A fairy tale!" and then we might negotiate. "How about a modern fairy tale with cars and houses instead of horses and castles," I'll say. (My standard Universalis opening move.) And then I'll ask what it's about and who's in it, and then we're ready to frame the first scene. "Where's the first scene?" And I'll let her run with it until she runs out of ideas and then usually do some kind of patching-up to try to make what she's done so far make some kind of sense. No dice, no tokens.

But we've also been playing Warhammer Quest, which is awesome - we used to play when she was 2, just building the dungeon and moving guys around in it - a couple weeks ago I introduced monsters - and at first she wasn't too crazy about it. "Why are there spiders?" But now she's like, "I want to hit the monster with my go away monster stick!" and "If we run out of energy I'll use this and we'll get our energy back. Like coffee." We cheat - the dungeon's half the size it's supposed to be. We've been TPK'd once ("We all ran out of energy and fell asleep.") and won once.

Other, activities: paper helicopters. Playing Set (she doesn't have to find actual sets, just matches).

BTW - Mark - just gave Dwarf Fortress another shot. The first time I just didn't get it and gave up. This time I used the tutorial. Jesus what a game.


I've got to admit, the reason I keep finding new activities for her isn't because she gets bored - it's because I get bored. She'd probably be happy playing Set for four hours straight. No ADD here.