This week was my nephew J’s fourteenth birthweek. (We’re not quite finished celebrating, as my family, my sister’s family, and my parents will all go out to dinner to celebrate on Monday.) My step-daughter-to-be D baked him this lovely cake, which I decorated with my mad frosting-writing skills.
Saturday my fiancé (A), best friend (L), J, and I played D&D together. Mainly character building. I’m a Dragonborn Cleric, L is a Halfling Ranger, and J is a Dragonborn Fighter. A is Dungeon Master. This is J and my first time playing. We’ll be meeting every first Saturday. We also watched the first 5 episodes of Series One of the new Doctor Who.
Today I will have a book club meeting to discuss Shadow Land, by Elizabeth Kostova. Review is still upcoming, though I have to say that I found it rather meh. I wonder what everyone else thought?
On last Sunday, we had our family night, where we ate pork chops and played our first-ever game of Cadoo, which is a children’s version of Cranium. It was quite a bit of fun. I finished listening to Caesar’s Last Breath, by Sam Kean, which will be my next book club book in two weeks. J, A, and I watched The Wolverine on Friday night, and found it fairly palatable. Much better than the other Wolverine movie! Wow.
This week, I acquired quite a few goodies.
I bought the Goelet translation of The Egyptian Book of the Dead, which is the second book on Harold Bloom’s Western Canon which I will probably not finish in my life-time, but it’s still fun to use as a guide. Actually, I believe Bloom suggested Budge’s translation, but from doing a little research, I’ve decided that Budge was notoriously sloppy in his translations – perhaps I will read both (I own Budge’s translation too), or I will just read the Goelet one, which has beautiful pictures.
I also acquired two math workbooks (one for each step-kid-to-be) and several board games. Because we’ve noticed that both kids sit like zombies either on their tablet or in front of the TV for almost an entire day every day if you let them, we have decided to institute screen-time rules so that they will do constructive or educational stuff. Or at least stop zombifying in front of a screen for 12 hours straight. They will get 3 hours of screen-time daily (TV in the morning till 8, and then 2 hours of tablet time) before they have no screen options left. Then, they can do something else (whatever they want) or they can do something constructive/educational for extra screen time. Examples would include reading, being read to, doing a math workbook, or playing a board game. The board games were suggested by M’s kindergarten teacher, who feels they are great for learning social skills, which M is currently working on. (He’s had a hard couple of weeks behaviorally, but has shown great improvement at the end of this week, when we instituted a new reward/discipline system. Hopefully it will continue to work. Not much seems to motivate him to behave; but “special daddy time” does seem to work right now.) Of course, we are also making an effort to take the kids out of home for indoor parks and such as well. This evening we will all go to an indoor trampoline arena with nephew J – if they are up to it after their road-trip back from grandparents’ house with their mother.
Saturday morning, before D&D A and I bought a new Outback to replace his 13 year old car. We also got a bike rack mounted on the back – so now this summer we will be able to go on bike rides with the kids. 🙂
We also bought new Samsung Halo phones. They are a step up from our old iPhone 5s which had slowed down unbearably after Apple pulled their jerk-move, “sacrificing processing time for battery life” (in other words, slowing down the older phones so that everyone would have to buy new ones). Yes, they said that people with older phones could get a discounted ($50 off) a battery replacement to speed the phone up again, but we didn’t qualify because that only goes back to iPhone 6. So we were just out of luck. Which means we are angry at Apple and decided to get Samsungs instead. Of course, this also means that Apple has hijacked any messages sent from iPhones after my switch. I’m sure they have an excuse for why that’s in my best interest.
Except one, I’m still reading the same books with the same motivations as last week: I Stop Somewhere – Negalley ARC, No one Cares About Crazy People (edification), Freeing Your Child From Anxiety (hoping to help D cope), When Breath Becomes Air (Wellcome Trust Bookprize 2017 Longlist), Fablehaven (to the kids), The Island of Doctor Moreau (literature study).
Have a nice week everyone!
Hibernator's Library 
I’m never sure if my comments are getting posted.
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Yup! Exactly. 🙂
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I love hearing all your upcoming plans for your step-children. Best of luck to you. Kids are difficult. Keep plugging away.
(Trying again)
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Thanks! I will. They can be hard, but they’re worth it.
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Oh, I get frustrated with Apple, too! I hope you love your new phone…and enjoy those books. Thanks for visiting my blog.
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You’re welcome. I’m glad that I won’t be owned by Apple anymore, even if I had to text each of my contacts and make sure they can still contact me by text.
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I love family night and try to do this at least once or twice a month. Either a movie night, game night or just sitting around together. Always fun!! I am riding out the storm that took out our power at a friends. So surreal looking at all the downed trees and power lines cut in half. Have a good Sunday!
Mary #SundayRoundup #8
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We’re trying to have a family night once a week. That way, we’ll at least squeeze one in a couple times a month. 🙂
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Congrats on the new vehicle! Looks nice. and have fun with the D&D game! Family nights are fun, I still love playing Trouble lolol.
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I’m not sure I’ve ever played Trouble! Now’s my chance.
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I remember really enjoying playing Trouble and Sorry as a kid.
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I loved Sorry, but never played Trouble. Just one we didn’t own, I guess.
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Wow, you had a busy week. I used to love playing Connect four and Sorry, really any board game. I want to get a bike so I can go riding and it would help with my exercise plans. Have a great week!
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My stationary bike is helping some, but I’ve still got to get up some motivation to ride it. At least I exercised Monday and Tuesday. I’ll try again tonight. Once spring is here, the outdoors will call to me and I’ll get more done that way.
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Happy Birthday to your nephew! My daughter will be having a long birthday this year as well since not everyone in the family could make it all at once. She’s expecting multiple cakes now. We’ll see. I’ve heard Shadow Land was a bit disappointing. I was hoping to hear otherwise as I really liked The Historian. I hope you enjoy your new car and cell phones. I can’t wait to trade my phone in. It’s got a big crack on the screen. I still have a few more months to go. I hope you have a great week!
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Unfortunately, Shadow Land was pretty meh. I loved The Historian too. The car and cell phones are working out great. Have a great week.
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Oh wow! Sounds like a REALLY busy week 🙂 Love the new car, and hope you enjoy your phones. I personally really like my Samsung more than my iPhone! Enjoy the boardgames and the books, and good luck with your kiddo’s and the screentime 🙂
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We haven’t instituted the screen time rule yet as the Spectrum workbooks hadn’t arrived. We’ll probably start on Saturday. I’m not looking forward to it.
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Yay! I have yet to see too many D&D/Pen & Paper RPG players out in the blogging world.I use to post updates about our current game quite a bit, so so much happened that it was hard to summarize. We are doing a Dragon Age campaign right now (with the Fantasy Age system, based on the video game of the same name), but we are starting another D&D campaign this week hopefully. I’ll be a Tielfing Warlock (surprise, surprise), there will also be a Half Orc Barbarian, a Half Elf Bard, and a Monk Drunken Master. So far it seems like most of our characters’ personalities will lend to some moral ambiguity and lots of ridiculous fun loving moments.
I have the Budge’s translation of The Book of the Dead as that was the one recommended to me, but I may have to check out Goelets. Can you also read the hieroglyphs? I had a book to help me learn, but I never really got around to it.
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I don’t know how to read hieroglyphs and probably will not learn as I have so many things to learn and so little time to do it in. The benefit of Budge’s translation is that it’s a classic.
As for D&D, we’ll only meet once a month, so I’m not sure how quickly the adventure will progress (I’ve never played before), but I will certainly update as long as it doesn’t become too complex to do so. 🙂 Have fun with your own game!
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I hope you have fun with it too! We do ours weekly. Dragon Age on Sundays and D&D on Wednesdays. The same person DM’s both games and I have no clue how he keeps all of this in his head because I’ve never once seen him use notes.
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