One to One (Part 2)
Back in April I was fortunate to have some one-on-one time with each of my daughters. In my last post, I shared how the seven-year-old and I spent our Saturday while the eleven-year-old was at Girl Scout camp. The following Saturday, the girls switched, with Lily heading to Girl Scout camp and Hannah spending the day with me. One-on-one time is always a treat, and I think we made some memories that day.
Our first stop that morning was the Verizon store. Hannah is finishing fifth grade this month and is heading to middle school in the fall. We’re sending her to a private school not far from my house (mostly for reasons discussed here), and she’s a little worried about losing touch with her friends, most of whom are continuing on to the public middle school for which her mom is zoned. She knows she’ll get a cell phone for middle school, and she keeps telling me that she needs it now, before school is out, so she can get all her friends’ numbers. I’ve tried to tell her that she can write her friends’ numbers down on a piece of paper, but she’s not interested in staying in touch 1980s style. Thus the Verizon visit, to check out our options.
I’m actually pretty excited about getting Hannah a phone. She’s at her mom’s house more than half the time, and having to call her mom to talk to her isn’t my favorite thing to do. Hannah has an email account, and we email occasionally, but I know she’ll check her text messages more often than her emails. I like the idea of having an easy way to tell her I’m thinking about her. She’s also getting to the age where I might leave her at home for short periods of time while I run errands. I’ll feel much more comfortable doing so when she has a phone.
What kind of phone she’ll get is an open question. I would prefer a basic phone, with voice and text but no Internet or apps. She goes online now, but only using computers in the family room, where I can keep an eye on her. She hasn’t asked about a Facebook or Twitter account, but a few of her friends use Instagram, and I can see that request coming. I’m actually looking forward to helping her learn to use social networks safely and responsibly, since that’s a topic that comes up in my day job and I think I can mentor her well in this area. But I don’t know if I want to start that just yet. However, the cheaper phone option might be to upgrade my current smart phone and give her my old one. I’ll have to do a little more research.
In the meantime, she’s very excited to be getting a phone… sometime.
After our outing to Verizon, Hannah and I headed over to the soccer fields for her game at noon. The game went fine, in that her team didn’t lose too badly and she stayed in good spirits throughout. She’s been with this team for a year now. The team did very well last year, but they lost a couple of key players this year (who upgraded to travel teams) and they’ve been struggling. Hannah’s not a star player, but she works hard, hustles when she needs to, and keeps her teammates spirits up. I’m really proud of her commitment to her team.
Our post-soccer lunch involved picking up sandwiches from Subway. Seeing Hawkeye and Ultron on Hannah’s kid’s meal led to a conversation about the West Coast Avengers, probably my favorite comic book back in the mid 80s. Hannah probably knows more about super-heroes than most of her friends, thanks to me and to times like this when I tell her all about comics I read when I was her age, or even younger.
The first issue of West Coast Avengers came out in 1984. I would have been eight, and I distinctly remember buying it with my own buck-twenty-five at the gas station across the street from my grandfather’s furniture upholstery shop. Grandma and Grandpa would often watch my brother and me while my mom ran errands, and walking across the street with Grandpa to pick up comics was always a highlight. I kept reading West Coast Avengers all the way through the end of the series, issue 102 in 1994, but it was those early issues in 1984 and 1985 that captured my imagination. I had fun telling Hannah about some of my favorite characters and storylines as we at our subs after soccer.
After lunch, we moved on to the highlight of the day: Catan Con. As I’ve mentioned many times here on the blog, we’re a board game family, and Settlers of Catan is one of our favorites. It just so happened that Mayfair Games, publisher of Settlers of Catan, held a convention right here in Nashville on April 25. Hannah was very excited to go, mostly, I think, because she didn’t know what a Settlers of Catan convention would be like. It turned out to be a lot of fun, thanks to some special versions of Settlers that Mayfair brought to the event. For instance, we played a giant-size version of Settlers on a custom floor mat, complete with oversize wooden pieces and big foam dice. New life goal: Buy a house with a bonus room, install this version of Settlers in that bonus room.
Mayfair had a games library with hundreds of games one could check out and play. Hannah spotted Rocket Jockey, thanks to some very cool box art. We played a game, with some help from another family at the convention who gave us some instructions. There’s not a lot of player interaction and parts of the game are overly complex, but it was clever and fun and Hannah liked it a lot. In fact, as we were leaving the convention much, much later that evening, she talked me into buying her a copy. It’s not a game I would have ordinarily bought, but Hannah doesn’t ask for games very often and I wanted to support her interest.
Not that we needed a souvenir from the convention, with all the swag that Mayfair games provided! For attending the con, we were given t-shirts, Catan pins (which Hannah promptly used to decorate the little canvas purse she got at Girl Scout camp the week before), and custom Nashville pieces for our Settlers game, one depicting Gaylord Opryland and one showing Broadway in downtown Nashville, as well as a “lonely cowboy” standee, along with rules for using these pieces in the base Settlers game. Short version: You replace the desert hex and the hex with the 2 on it with the two Nashville hexes, and you replace the robber with the lonely cowboy. When you roll a 7, instead of the robber taking away resources, the lonely cowboy gives resources to players who have settlements or cities adjacent to the Nashville hexes. Clever.
I hadn’t appreciated until the convention just how flexible the Settlers of Catan base game is. I knew about expansions to the base game, including Seafarers, which I’ve played a couple of times. I didn’t know that Mayfair sold $5 scenario packs that added elements and rules to the base game, similar to the Nashville custom pieces but somewhat more involved. I learned about Das Buch Zum Spielen (“The Play Book,” only available in German), which features 15 scenarios expanding on the base game, several of which use special pieces that come with the book. But what really showed me the flexibility of the game mechanics was the highlight of the convention for Hannah and me: The Big Game, a version of Settlers Hannah and I got to play with 42 other players. That’s right, a 44-player game!
For the Settlers fans out there: The Big Game is a version of Settlers designed for an arbitrary even number of players. Half the players sit on one side of a very long table, the other half on the other side. Between each pair of players is a pre-printed game mat. Each player starts with a couple of settlements on their side of the island on their game mat, and players can interact with the five players immediately surrounding them, one to the left, one to the right, and three across the table. All the left-side players take a turn, then all the right-side players. Each turn is timed (so the game goes quickly) and announced by a game director with a microphone, so it has a bit of a Bingo feel. You earn victory points in most of the usual ways, plus you get bonus points if you establish a settlement on another player’s territory. (Seafarers rules, so you can travel from island to island.) The first player to 25 victory points wins. As it turned out, a really clever adaptation of the basic Settlers game.
Hannah and I had heard about the Big Game earlier in the day, but we weren’t sure we would stick around late enough to play. The Big Game didn’t even start until 8pm, which is almost Hannah’s bedtime. Plus, Hannah was supposed to go back to her mom’s after Lily and her mom got back from Girl Scout camp that evening. But her mom didn’t have particular plans that night, so she said Hannah could stay out with me. When Hannah saw the Mayfair folks setting up for the Big Game, she was hesitant to play. I think she was a little intimidated at playing Settlers with adults she wasn’t related to. But when the start of the game was announced, Hannah ran over to play. I think the deciding factor was the free stuff all the players received, including sets of Catan pieces (settlements and such) in custom colors, including pink and purple. Hannah was determined to get those pink and purple pieces!
The Big Game turned out to be a blast. Hannah was excited to play with adults, to play such a cool version of Settlers, and to play past her bedtime. We had some really nice players around us, including my friend Jeff’s old youth pastor, whom I had already met through Jeff. Jeff stopped by, too, and took some photos of us playing. (Thanks, Jeff!) Hannah is an experienced enough Settlers player that she did well, even picking up the new-to-her Seafarers rules easily. The game lasted just under two hours, when some player down the table hit 25 victory points. We collected our swag, including the game mat we played on, and headed home, way past Hannah’s bedtime. But she was beaming.
What a unique, wonderful day with my daughter. I think I was beaming, too.