With Christmas vacation looming just around the corner I look on in envy as friends and family tweet, post, and talk about staying up late and sleeping in till noon. I smile and nod because I know that Christmas break is going to mean getting up and making breakfast for a cute, but demanding little girl who is home everyday and thinks that sleeping late means 7, 7:30 at the latest. Christmas break also means lots of free time to fill and as a geek parent I want to fill that time with equal parts fun, nerdy, and educational.
Pea is really into Doctor Who right now so Santa will be bringing her some really cool Doctor themed items for her stocking. I skipped the freaky looking Weeping Angel made from stress foam because those things would give me nightmares. Pea hasn’t seen the angels episodes, but is begging to. There will also be Funkos of some of her favorite nerdy characters and two weeks of free time to continue to cut her nerd chops. And this requires a lot of supervision and screening because many of our favorite nerdy things are not for innocent 6 year olds. Firefly is a great example. I have a deep and abiding love for Firefly and I’m pretty sure that Kailey would be one of Pea’s favorite characters, but the sex factor puts it out of her reach for at least a decade.
While I’ve been holding off on Harry Potter until she was old enough to enjoy it without being frightened by dead parents and dementors. This week we started the first in the series with the understanding that once we made it through half of the book we would watch the first movie. I want to make sure that she has a good understanding of the story as it’s written before we move to film adaptations. The first chapter of the book moved so slowly that I almost lost her, but she’s determined to make it through and I don’t know if that’s because she wants to hear the story or because she really just wants to see this movie that, according to her, all of her friends have seen already. But I imagine that there will be lots of wizarding around our house this Christmas.
Aside from some of our favorite books and shows there will be lots and lots of video games. With her being a beginning reader there aren’t a lot of games on the 3DS for her to play right now. She can still navigate Animal Crossing and manage to buy all of the shoes and clothes in the damned game while I work to pay her mortgage and build her expansions, but the games that she really loves (J)RPGs are too text dependent for her just yet and many of them are rife with scantily clad women (Bravely Default) and mature innuendo (Fantasy Life). So we have to wait a bit for those or play lap co-op with some narrative editing. But for this Christmas Mama has gone out and scored some of the old Mario games like Super Mario Galaxy and the HD reboot of the Zelda Windwaker game for the Wii U, so there will be some hipster gaming going on around here this weekend. “I played these games before you were born/before they were cool…ok, I never played these games, but I could have!”
And board games, oh gawd the board games. We will play until there is no playing left to do and then we will watch other people play in the more appropriate episodes of Wil Wheaton’s Tabletop series. N.B. This week he did his first episode with kids and they played Catan Junior!
In short, geek parenting this holiday season is going to look a lot like good parenting all year round. This Christmas I’m just going to make time and PLAY WITH MY KID! What are you playing in the coming weeks?
Happy Whatever You Celebrate, my friends!
