Borys is normally at Rowany Festival for Easter so is rarely here to reap the rewards of the havoc she sows before she journeys south.  Normally I make a bit of a treasure hunt around the house.  Carefully hidden little caches of chocolate easter eggs each with a clue (used to be pictorial clues but the Small Child can read now) stashed all over the house that eventually lead to the mother lode of chocolately hyperactivity inducing goodness.

Which was great.  I’d hide stuff all over the house and several days later Dad and the Small Child would follow up all the clues and have enough chocolate to sustain a small Ethiopian village for a month…. and given that this usually occured in my absence I never had to deal with the Small Child bouncing off the walls full of refined sugars.  But this year I have not ventured south for Festival and have for the first time been here to see the Easter Egg Treasure Hunt unfold…. and while the rug rat has a hoot…. it’s not pretty!  Filling up a Small Child whose default position is to be already full of boundless energy with chocolate at 0700 !?!?!  Whose stupid idea was that?!?!?    :S

Not only this… but the stupid Easter Bunny (who may or may not have been under the influence of copious quantities of vodka at the time of planning and deploying said Treasure Hunt) left some pretty dodgy clues at 0130 this morning.  Which meant that watching the Small Child trying to decipher them was a bit like pulling teeth…. Bad Easter Bunny!  Bad Easter bunny!  A seven year old does NOT have the requisite attention span for cryptic crossword style clues so in future notes WILL be simpler and more direct!!!  🙂

When the Small Child started at the Catholic school I worried for the first few months there that he’d out us for the godless non-church going hypocrites that we are.  The concern turned out to be all for naught as it has eventually became evident that most of the parents at the school are also non-church going hypocrites too.  Yay for the whole birds of a feather thing!  I mean I wanted the Small Child to attend there because I know it’s a great little school with excellent programs and an educational environment where a modicum of respect for the teachers, parents and other students is encouraged and expected…. but you know that’s just me.

We switched the Small Child to the god bothering school after a few unsavoury incidents* reminded us (well mostly me) why I was generally prejudiced against public schools in the first place….. and I figured that being raised a Catholic hadn’t left any permanent damage on me (twitch, twitch) so we Teflon coated the Small Child and figured he’d be fine.  I’ve noticed that it’s still a great school – but things have changed.  It seems that it’s no longer the educational oubliette of hellfire and damnation that I remember with such fondness but rather it’s become more like a well mannered presbyterian youth centre really.  Plenty of warm fuzzies but a little light in the ‘smiting from on high’ department (thank fuck).

It’s supposed to be that time of year when the whole Lent thing gets trundled out and there’s a story about the 40 days and 40 nights, lectures about sacrifice, an expectation of some personal forfeiture for the duration and a bit with a fish (on Fridays).  Somewhere the schedule appears to have changed…. the teachers had arranged a special Pancake Tuesday (not Shrove Tuesday, note) breakfast of pancakes with jam and maple syrup etc.  Normally this preceeds Ash Wednesday where they used to trudge us over to the church for mass (with the purple bits yeah?) and the little ash crosses on the forehead bit and then back to class to write up what we were ‘giving up for lent’.  Well that’s how it went when I was little. 

The Small Child’s class however only did the pancake bit and weren’t taken to mass and there was no ritualized application of oily burnt vegetation whatsoever.  I mean what’s wrong with this picture?  No fire and brimstone?  No drumming it into the hapless children what horrible sinners they are?  Tut tut tut.  My how things have changed…. Sr Mary Gabriel would be turning over in her grave!  (I’m pretty sure that miserable old woman would be dead by now… but the old ladies they do tend to live forever sometimes.)

Personally I’d like to be able to give up prescription medication for Lent… but then I wouldn’t be able to be burried in consecrated ground so there goes that idea.  Anyway I’m no longer worrying that the school will find us out to be Godless heathens… but rather maybe they should be starting to worry that We (the parents) a’re onto them and we know they’re only doing a fraction of the amount of God bothering we expect for our exhorbitant school fees!   🙂

* incident in question under cut

Orright.  We seem to have made a seriously bad judgement call with the Wii and the Small Child.  His favourite games were Zelda Windwalker or something about the Occarina of Time and Phantom Hourglassses or some such shit .  So naturally when going shopping for the Wii we went looking for the newest Zelda game which is called Zelda and the Twilight Princess… of the Zelda and the fucking Twilight Princess shopping disaster fame. 

As small children are wont to do when they have a new toy to keep them occupied, the Small Child immersed himself in his new game.  It’s nearly been two weeks since Christmas and I had noticed him getting increasingly frustrated with the game and when asked to turn if off for a break was doing so but with rather poor grace.  Yesterday however it became abundantly clear that the game was having a truly detrimental affect on his behaviour.  Angel had picked up a bad habit of not reading the instructions in the game that told him what to do next – instead choosing to run around the different evironments smucking things about until he either stumbled onto the objectives or threw his hands up in disgust and ran up the back of the house.  Where he would jump on his Dad’s PC and have a look at a game walkthrough on the internet that told him exactly what he needed to do next thereby negating most of the reading and problem solving required to succeed in the game – the very things that I’d been told these games can be good for. 

Anyway, yesterday Yale tried to help the Small Child by suggesting he should read the instructions on the screen or he wouldn’t know what to do next… the Small Child basically responded with what is his version of having a tanty.  Which is to say he pulled a sour face and muttered something unintelligible but blatantly belligerent and totally ignored the helpful suggestion.  He doesn’t really wind it up like some kids his age do (for which I am eternally grateful) but this was basically his version of being willfully disobedient and it brought into stark reality how his behaviour has been altering since he started playing this game. 

So I have a look at the game and suddenly realise that it’s got an "M" rating on it (stupid Mommy didn’t even know computer games had ratings on them) and depending on which reviews you read they state that this game is appropriate for children of either 12 and over or 15 and over.  I asked Mr K if he was aware of it and he said he thought that the other Zeldas were the same yes?  So I look them up – no they’re rated "G".  The old Zelda was a cute little guy wandering around in cute mario-esque environments, sailing his boat and playing his occarina in a very cute cartoony fashion and the new Wii Zelda is a far more realistic guy stomping around dungeon environments in iron boots, slashing at demons and eviscerating monsters in a far darker and not even remotely cartoon fashion. 

Well as you can imagine we’ve removed the offending article immediately and had a good sit down chat with the Small Child about how his behaviour has been unacceptable of late, particularly in regards to his ability to cope with frustration in his games and explained to him that unfortunately it seems this game is just a little too old for him and we should not have bought it in the first place.  He was (as is to be expected) a little upset that we had decided he couldn’t play his game anymore but it was shortlived and he has been promising me all day today that he would try and show me how mature he can be so that he can have it back one day to finish even if he has to wait until he is 12….

A timely thought courtesy of Yale and GraphJam:

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