---------------------------------------- Christmas Updates December 26th, 2017 ---------------------------------------- Do you have friends or family who send you one of those end-of-year newsletters as a Christmas card? If you're not familiar, they tend to be summaries of the major events and achievements of the year for each family member. They're often formatted badly and feature a giant family photo as a header. All in all, super cheesy. I thought about writing one of those here as a Gopher Christmas Update, but I think I'll spare everyone. Instead I just wanted to drop a couple notes about how my Christmas day went. My son is five and the absolute perfect age for Christmas awesomeness. He was really into everything about the season from the start. This year he was paying attention to all the holiday songs and asking us what they were about. We watched about 15 Christmas movies, including such classics as Home Alone and Ernest Saves Christmas. We drove around to look at lights, and we looked at Google Earth to talk about Santa and his travels. Life has been pretty good this season. On Christmas morning he had a bunch of presents to open and a few surprises from Santa. The toys were all a big hit and he managed to play with just about everything all in one day. Although there were a lot of things he asked for, there are two surprise gifts that I expect to become the favorites in the long run: 1) Legos! I got the classic lego box with 144 pieces for him. I don't want him to get into Lego Sets. They're too expensive and too restrictive. He seems to be of the same mind. He built a whole city last night, complete with rotating restaurant tower and space ships. In a couple months I'll bust out all my legacy legos and toss them his way as well. 2) GameBoy Color! I grabbed one of these at a cool game shop in Myrtle Beach. I also picked up all 3 Zelda games for the system, Pokemon Silver, and Super Mario World. He's still a bit young for the games, but he likes watching me play Nintendo (he has my old system) and he tries occasionally. I expect this to sit around for most of the year, but it'll prime him for some amazing classic gaming. I'm working as hard as I can to build an appreciation for imagination in his play and games. The classic NES and GB games fit right in. They're simplistic, but also challenging. He worked with me, directing my choices, as we beat The Guardian Legend earlier this year. I think it's good for his growth to experience games that really challenge you and don't let you just skip the hard parts or show you how to get by with a ghost. Trial and error and perserverence! Speaking of games that require perserverence, I beat the first playthrough of Escape Goat last week and I'm working on the second set now. There's some insanely tricky boards. If you like puzzle games, or goats, or both, pick it up on GOG or Steam. I hope you all had a good holiday. Cheers