Newsroom

The boys set up a newsroom with desks for themselves this afternoon. Thing One said his name was Timmy Tim Tim, and he works at a newspaper writing stories, drawing pictures and fixing mistakes. His desk is the art table in the dining room, and his markers stand up on his desk (but they fall down every time he moves). He has a stack of paper, a baseball, and candy on his desk. Thing Two has partitioned the dining room table into a cubicle for himself, he has a cash register (which serves as a computer/typewriter), some boxes and a stack of paper. His name is Pete, and he looks at other people's work and fixes their mistakes (like Dapper Dad). My name is Violet, and I make art on the computer. My cubicle is on the other side of Pete's on the dining room table. This is how we spent the afternoon. Although, it's the first office I've worked in where some of the office workers were climbing on others' desks and chairs while doing some sort of potty dance.

Pac-Man (part 1)

Day 1: Thing One wanted to make a Pan-Man board out of paper, so Nana helped him cut out thin blue strips for the edges, yellow pellets, and of course Pac-Man, Blinky, Inky, Pinky and Sue. We play a lot of paper Pac-Man on the coffee table.

Day 2: One level of Pac-Man is not enough for Thing One. He needs to do a pink level (2) and a yellow level (3). He also needs Dapper Dad to scout out the level beyond the yellow level on the video game to see what the proper color is, should we make a fourth level. He has not been able to do this yet. Meanwhile, I regret not buying a paper punch at Target earlier in the day as I cut lots of tiny pellets for each board. We all play more paper Pac-Man, a game where the speeds of the manually operated characters are highly irregular with three-year-old and five-year-old operators. I told Thing One my idea of making a Pac-Man birthday cake for Dapper Dad's brother-in-law. Now he wants the Pac-Man cake for his birthday party. "I'm really into Pac-Man right now," he said.

Day 3: Since the boards are made of strips of paper, I had the idea that we could draw them on a bigger piece of paper, eliminating the need to rebuild the board several times during a single game. Thing One liked the idea and wanted to use my special black art board so that the levels look more like the TV version with the black background. I suggested that he work on sketches of the boards so that he is happy with the final board we make on the (relatively pricey) black board. He made five sketches that get progressively better before finishing two more final sketches of the final board. This took much of the afternoon. And of course, one board isn't enough. We must do three in the right colors, so we need to analyze and rank the boards according to difficulty so that we can color code them properly (blue, then pink, then yellow). Also, we still play a lot of paper Pac-Man.