[Personal Blog] Creative Mommy Phase

I know it's a little bit weird to say that I'm doing the "mommy living" but sometimes I feel that way. Truly, it's difficult to not feel like a mother who is burdened with two young children that need entertaining at all times. Even though it's technically only 4-5 hours each day during weekdays and maybe 3-5 hours during the weekends.

Every day, I try to think about ways to take their attention away from their iPads or from the SmartTV. I hate that they consume a lot of YouTube videos and I hate that the eldest, who just turned 5 this July, started saying, "what the fuck" all of a sudden. You can't imagine the horror that I felt once he started dropping those F-bombs. I did my best to stay calm, casually dismissing it the first time that I've heard it from him (thinking that it will just go away if you don't have any reactions to it--as most of the things they say at this age) but the second and third time really did it for me. I immediately checked all the videos that he watched and looked if there's a new channel that he just watched recently that is not suitable for young children or tweens. I didn't found any so I reported it to the parents. They told me that he must have heard it from someone during conversations but they did not elaborate any longer. I think I have an idea where he heard it after all.

And so, we paint. We color coloring book sometimes. We go out and play on the playground. I took the youngest, who's only 2, outside and play with bubbles or the watergun. Sometimes we even water plants. From time to time we go to the library and pick up books to read or just do some reading in there. I love that here in Sweden, libraries are per city and you'll find them in the centrum. Centrums are like the town centers and you can find all major establishments and supermarkets there most of the time.

But the whole reason that I am doing this blog post right now is to tell you how we made a whole board game for ourselves, consisting of all the things that the eldest kid, O, really likes.

Just like any other kids, he plays Minecraft. I introduced it to him and life has never been the same ever since. He learned to make a lot of cool tricks and builds just by watching YouTube (it can be helpful at times BUT NOT ALL THE TIME) and sometimes we play together in his server. I love Minecraft personally and it's a game that my boyfriend and I play religiously (if my internet permits it). 

He likes Roblox too. Something that I am not familiar with. I can't understand the game so I just read, or rather skim online, some lores and gameplay of it. So yeah. Haha.

He also plays a lot of Five Nights at Freddy's, watches a lot of Jamesify's videos (who plays GTA5, btw) and of course, Star Wars. I don't even know how it started but I remember telling him about Star Wars when I got so hooked up by The Mandalorian. 

All of these things we combined to create this monstrosity:

We also added some Swedish things

We made everything from scratch, with him coloring most of the figures in here (as I encourage it so that he will not be bored and just go back to watching on the TV while I do this). 

Coloring on the floor since his sister is using the table

Even with the dice, since I really don't want to buy a new one, we just repurposed a Bamse dice from their Mix n' Match game. I cut 5 small pieces of paper, asked him to draw dots on them from 1 to 5 and just leave Bamse's face as the number '6'. The figures, I drew them as well.

My character is the Princess Peach Among Us Crewmate. Don't ask why.

He was so excited when we started this project and he was even more hyped after we finished. The parents, especially the dad, was really amazed that we managed to concoct one, manageable and easy board game for kids. They were so happy to play it even when it wasn't done yet. 

So yeah, my host kid and I did this together. He was included in everything and the whole idea of the game is from his interest. I hope he'll remember this one day that we spend two days creating our very own board game consisting of all the things that he love when he was 5 years old.