Thursday 9 August 2012

Playstation Night & Picnic Morning: Summer 2012

"Playstation Nights" have been a long standing tradition with my nephews. I wrote about a previous one in 2010 (which I just read back and it made me giggle), but didn't mention what they were. Many years ago they wanted to play the Playstation for ages, but would have to go home and get upset. I decided that on one of the Friday nights, after school, we would have a Playstation Night.

The rules are simple, they aren't allowed to argue, and can play the Playstation for as long as they want, and I will provide sweets and other snacks and play too. This hopefully makes me the cool uncle (in reality, I genuinely can't stay up as late as they can, as they don't even start to get tired before 4am).

There are often other activities that go with a Playstation Night, such as a "bear hunt". I am against hunting, but have resigned to call it that. It started because Sam, who isn't as obsessed with computer games as the other two, wanted to do a "monster hunt". In this we would all dress up, arm ourselves with Nerf guns, and go downstairs when its pitch black and hunt monsters. Somewhere along the way "monster" turned into "bear", so now the bears are monster bears (not nice innocent bears).

Anyway, Friday the 3rd of August was to the the first Playstation Night of in mine and Brandi's house. She prepared by making cakes and food, and I went to pick them up.

We decided we should try and get them to do other things than play on the computer all night. First of all we went walking around the area, looking for Geocaches and going to the park. We also showed them the community garden, which has a load of apple trees. On the way back we went into Tesco and bought some snacks for the night.

When we got back we played Risk. I didn't get to play Risk when I was younger, but I love it now. I thought I had a clear victory, but then they allied, and even though I recruited Charlie onto my side, try quickly ripped through Asia, and was on the verge of taking Australia before I called a truce.

That was about as long as we could stop Logan playing League of Legends, which he didn't move from the rest of the night, while me, Brandi, Charlie, and Sam played Bomberman, and then started drawing, and watched a film.


Brandi was the first to drop, going up to bed at about 12:30. I was pretty much asleep at that time, but stayed on the sofa. At 2:30 I gave up and had to leave the rest of them downstairs playing. I think they finally got to bed at about 4:30.

In the morning they were up before me too. I'm getting old.

In the morning, Charlie desperately wanted to go back and look for a Geocache that we couldn't find the night before. While we were looking, Mom, Dad, Vicky, Eloise, Carly, Paul and Savannah all turned up to go for a picnic.




We still couldn't find the Geocache, but the picnic was really nice. The kids went on peddle boat things and got soaked, and the girls went on a bouncy slide. Afterwards we went a walk around the forest and, as usual, I got lost.



It was a really good day, but all a bit much for dad.


2 comments:

  1. I'd totally want you to be my uncle.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I always played Bomber Man during typhoons in Hong Kong - the kids would have to put themselves to bed as their uncaring mother refused to move from the screen, thumbs blistered the following morning. (but 2 a.m. was the latest I stayed up - I'm such a light-weight compared to your nephews)

    ReplyDelete