Lucas Chronicles: puzzles

Lucas likes to play video games on his phone or a tablet. What’s interesting is once he understands the objective of the game, it isn’t long before he figures out how to solve it in his own.

One of the things he plays is Unblock Me on Android. Half the time he is able to figure it out and the rest he need a little bit of help.

One of his favorite games to play while stuck in his car seat is Unblock Ball. Here you move tiles with a marble track in different directions to make a path for the marble. He has solved about 3/4ths of the puzzles on his own.

Lately he has been playing these “pull the pin” games. They used to be mini games part of the gardenscape or homescape series but now they are standalone games.

It’s not all video games and screen time, we make sure he has offline fun like LEGO, painting, drawing and puzzle games too.

We have wooden puzzles that he likes to play with. He hasn’t touched this one for about a year but today, after he played with it for about an hour he figured out three ways to solve it all by himself.

Some people think that you shouldn’t let toddlers have tooich screen time, if at all. We tried to minimize as much as we could but since we haven’t had a Yaya for over a year, letting The Child play games or watch YouTube Kids is the only way for us to get some work or house chores accomplished. We believe that it’s okay to let them have some screen time as long as you balance it with other activities like playing ball or biking. Also, make sure that you know what The Child is watching, know the characters, the stories and the lessons they can pick up so that when they mention it later then you know how to interact with them accordingly. We also make sure to curate stuff that we don’t like and explain to The Child why we don’t like it when he watches stuff like Peppa Pig (not a good role model) or The Teletubbies (no point)

Sometimes we like to tell him to stop watching Blippi or Paw Patrol toys for a while and watch more educational content like Storybots or Octonauts. We always explain why and it helps to show enthusiasm for the stuff they like.