First birthday of the year

Sliding into the March birthday season, it’s the Smaller Animal’s birthday weekend, so it works out nicely that I don’t have to do a long post this week.  You know, I was just looking at what we did last year for the corresponding weekend, and this weekend was mostly the same: Subway and Panda Express, make The Mother cook “Burden spaghetti” (we call it that because it comes from my side of the family, although, since it actually derives from my mother’s family, it should more properly be called “Baird spaghetti,” and the tale of that recipe is probably worthy of its own blog post one day), attend a showing of a CGI movie.  Last year we couldn’t find a place to watch the chosen flick (Early Man, which we saw later when it came out on DVD/streaming, and it was quite excellent); this year we went with the Lego Movie 2, which was easier to find and just as entertaining.  Also, at home we watched Ralph Breaks the Internet, which is yet another CGI movie, and it was also quite fun.  Also, birthday donuts again (pretty much everyone gets that for their birthday), and still more videogames.

The new thing—well, it’s still technically a videogame, so perhaps not entirely new—this year was Nintendo Labo, which is this bizarre concoction of cardboard and string kits that you build, and then play videogames with, most of involves which a lot of moving around.  It’s half craft kit, half videogame, and half exercise machine.  It’s really quite amazing on a lot of levels.  First of all, my kid is, right this very second, jumping around in what is essentially a VR rig made out of carbboard, that he assembled himself without any real tools, and is now using to control a giant robot on the screen that he makes punch and stomp things by, well, punching and stomping.  So that’s pretty impressive right off the bat.  It was also amazing how much time he was willing to put into following the laborious instructions, which are themselves amazing, because instead of being scores of printed pages with indecipherable diagrams and badly translated text, they’re friggin’ movies.  And not just movies, because they use the gaming console, so you can back up, or zoom in, or change the camera angle.  Shit, man: if Ikea ever figures out how to do instrucitons like this, comedians will run out of material.

So it’s been a pretty decent weekend, and I think the kid has had fun.  And in 3 more weeks we get to do it all again, only with a more tyrannical master: our fairy princess will be turning 7.  Joy.