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I’ve just gotten back from one final, final hurrah with the family, this time to celebrate my niece’s fifth birthday, which is officially this Sunday.  In The Age of The Virus, it was one of the smaller birthday shindigs, but still a great deal of fun (pizza and wings, along with good company, certainly help).

Earlier in the week, my older brother—the other uncle on my niece and nephews’ dad’s side of the family—took the two older kiddos to Chuck E. Cheese, where—as children of the 1990s will remember—“a kid can be a kid.”  That, too, was an adventure, and a bit different than my own, vanishingly rare childhood visits to the Mecca of Cheese and Arcade Games.

Finally, this post will look at one of the more intriguingly interactive gifts my niece received:  the LEGO Mario playsets.  She received the starter kit and several expansions, all of which the Mario figurine—which syncs with a LEGO Mario app on your cellphone via Bluetooth—can interact with in various ways.  You can build your own courses, fighting enemies and collecting coins along the way to the finishing flagpole.  It’s great fun.

The bulk of this post will be slightly delayed, as I’ve been having so much family fun time, I haven’t been able to write until nearly 9:30 PM!  I’m also quite exhausted from aforementioned family fun time, so writing a one-thousand-word essay isn’t in the cards tonight.

The long-awaited post about my trip to Universal Studios is still in the works.  I just haven’t had an opportunity to get it done.  I will hopefully have it completed soon.  My apologies for the delay.

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