Susan Senator

The boyz have been playing Little Big Planet, which is the cutest and most fun PS3 game on earth! The character are sack puppets, kind of like brown hackysacks with arms and legs. They move like stuffed dolls but also are animated like cartoons. Adorable. We all just laugh and laugh as we send our characters on rocket rides, have them dodge waterwheels and flames and spikey bridges. They get whipped around and battered by the winds of fate and yet they hold on somehow with their little fabric hands. Mine kept dying yesterday and eventually I put down the controller before anyone else got hurt… I think Ben was relieved. I was, too. My continued epic fails were starting to give me that feeling I used to get when Laura was beating me at a game. (When that feeling set in, I would eventually just toss the board and say, “I QUIT!” Eventually Dad said I couldn’t do that, but…)

I tried to get Nat to join in the fun, but its appeal eluded him. Yet I was relaxed and okay with that because he was just so full of life yesterday, from the moment he stepped off the van. I just grabbed him and — kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss — my boyz just endure it.

It’s hard to remain sad and doubtful about Nat’s happiness when he comes home and it’s just Joyful House Stompies the whole time. And then when we dropped him off at Social Group (the gang was going up to Kowloon for some Chinese food, which is one of Nat’s favorites — chicken lo mein and tangerine beef ) he burst out of the car and was doing Joyful Parking Lot Stompies, over and over again. One thing that did hurt a little was watching him for a moment, when he slowed down and was just standing alone, apart, while all the others in Social Group hugged each other and chatted. (Does that matter to Nat? He was kind of still and quiet. What could I do? Nothing, nothing, nothing. You can’t hug it away anymore. You can’t talk to him, you’re the Mom. You just have to sit in your car and ache. Okay, at least it didn’t last long. ) Nat just jumps into the van with that grin on his face, and they speed away, a bus full of happy, adorable, eccentric characters, going wherever the Social Group machine takes them. Kind of like their own Little Big Planet.

Take a look at Our Planet: