Jacob has a busy summer schedule with a ton of classes on Outschool. Greek Gods, mythology, astronomy, trivia, a bunch of topics. But ultimately, it works out to about an hour a day. On top of that, he’s playing Fortnite with friends online, a bit of XBox for other stuff, and reading. Overall? A recipe for eventual boredom.

So while Andrea and I are working full-time, we’re taking breaks here and there to break up his schedule. Usually we try to switch off so he gets two playbreaks in the day, one with Mom, one with Dad.

Today we did it together and broke out the board games. We started Settlers of Catan, played for an hour, and then he had to jet across the room to his computer for his latest class. Mom and I went back to work. Then, later, he and I did some Lego together for a new project, followed by finishing the Catan game. I know lots of people who get bored with Catan, need the expansion packs to keep it interesting for example, or have nailed the “optimized” placement of settlements, cities and roads. We kind of do a bit of a random layout of numbers, while ensuring nothing is too hard to get, but each time our game is different. One time we played, I somehow failed to get wheat early on, which was REALLY frustrating, yet I still managed to win through armies and roads. This time, we started playing, realized that some of the numbers weren’t fairly distributed, adjusted so it wouldn’t be a two-sided game only, and early on it looked like a winner. We were all getting resources and doing stuff quickly. I thought it might be a fast game.

And then? We stopped rolling one number (10) which controlled the majority of our wood. And we were blocked for wheat. Do you know how many things you can do without wood or wheat? Zero. It was a LONG game. Andrea finally put us out of our misery.

Then we had dinner, considered a movie, and Jacob opted for playing Moonshot Euchre, which we haven’t played in a few days. Again, a LONG game. And we never finished. We’re not even CLOSE, actually, but it was 9:30 and time for a little penguin to crash.

I also finished another book that he is going to read, and it was REALLY good. Now I want to talk to him about it, but Andrea is likely to read it too, and now I have to wait for all three of us to finish! Sheesh. 🙂

Overall, I think it was a good day together, even if we’re not on vacation yet.

Today I choose to spend more time with my son playing games.

What conscious choices are you making today to create a new reality?