flea

This has been the weekend of the bay-buh-lade. Bay-buh-lade is a game that Dillo has created. I think it originated with a toy called a Battle Blade. These are plastic tops, with serrated edges, and you spin them at each other and make them battle. I think at after school, the kids have started making "tops" out of legos and battling them. This is what we have been doing at home, pretty much continuously, since 6am Saturday. There's a basic structure of each bay-buh-lade, built around a core that's square foursies with a platform made of two by fours in the middle, and then you build an outer ring of two by fours that sits on that, and then you add fins and wings and other elaborations. The good ones get names - the Ice Queen, The Firestarter - partly based on their colors. After a lot of building and tinkering, you sit on the wooden floor and spin them at each other. My method is twisting using the top foursie of the core; Dillo has a two-handed method using the arms. Sometimes the bay-buh-lades don't hit each other when you spin. If they do, the one that keeps going wins, while the one that gets knocked off loses. Losing pieces is points lost too. We have mostly managed to keep sibling fighting over this to a minimum, and have fun instead of getting too into point-keeping. It helps that one parent is usually involved.

It's great that Dillo is creative and made his own game and loves to build things and is learning about symmetry (to make them spin well) and how to build them strong and so forth. But after two full days I am so tired of the bay-buh-lade game. We need another 5 year old boy to keep up with the obsession.