The new game

This is my latest attempt at a new game to play with Dalton. His interest in larger Lego sets has sharply declined. Well, it's not exactly like that. He likes to have a large set out. He likes to initiate work on it. However, once we sit down, perhaps one step actually gets done (less if he is tired). I'm not sure if it's too difficult or he doesn't want to focus or what.

So I was thinking that we have this huge box of Legos and he generally enjoys smaller projects. My latest game idea goes like this.

1. He and I start out with bags containing identical Lego pieces.
2. One of us builds something.
3. The other copies it.

We've maybe played this three times. The first time he copied the little car I had built in about ten seconds while I was distracted.

"Hey Dad! Look out the window!" Whomp! Little car copied.

The second time, he built this elaborate spacecraft buggy thing. I should have gotten a picture of that. With my luck it wont happen again.

The third time, he dumped the two bags of Legos that I had painstakingly matched for the game into one combined pile and built another elaborate vehicle. I have to say that I admired the creativity, but I wasn't excited about separating the Legos into two bags later. Dalton, I've got this great idea for a new game. Sigh!

It's very reminiscent of me trying to get him to play concentration with an alphabet card deck. My evil plan was to play concentration in front of him and hope he became interested. It worked once. The next time, he collected the cards and said "Let's play Dominion". Dominion is a card game that he has seen Cathy and I play with each other and also at parties. I highly recommend it. However, Dalton understands the rules to be that you flip over cards and call out their funny names. This is pretty much what concentration quickly turned into for us. For a short while, I was able to get him to read the words that I spelled with my funny named cards. He rapidly caught on that there was educational content masquerading as play.

What you see above is my latest attempt. I put it together when Cathy had taken Dalton to Burger King to play on the slides. Keep in mind that this whole Burger King thing has turned into less a play on the slides thing and more a "I get apple juice and maybe some fries" thing.

I think you might be seeing the pattern here. I'm hoping this game catches on with him, but I think it's more likely he'll convert it to something I'm not anticipating.