Unsinkable

First, a picture of the family band Charles created.  They look pretty good to me, though it is funny to imagine what the kids will look like as adults (or like, CGI representations of adults):

The family band

(That was before Charles and I played until 1am last night/this morning and won 7 million more fans and a tour bus.)  Anyway…

The unintended (though not entirely unanticipated) consequence of playing RockBand3 with the kids is the new musical vocabulary they are picking up.  I say that it wasn’t entirely unanticipated because, at first, I just bought Beatles Rockband because it did occur to me that the kids would be singing the songs around the house and wouldn’t it be nice to hear Beatles songs.  And then it turned out that the only song the kids were particularly good at singing was Yellow Submarine, which I was always lukewarm about to begin with, and having it on repeat via the kiddos was not really improving my attitude towards that particular submarine.

And, Charles really wanted RockBand 3.  And Nic started a rumor that you could download Buffy the Vampire Slayer singing “Walk Through the Fire” on it, and I didn’t check the veracity of that rumor, and I bought the game.  (So far I think Nic is full of it, but if you know differently please advise.)  Obviously, I like it a lot.  It is an incredibly fun video game to me.  There are very few video games that I really, really want to play well, and this is one of them.  And the whole family loves music, and this is a fun thing to do together* (we do need another controller, though, because really only three of us can play at any one time right now).

But it still cracked me up completely today when all of a sudden, out of the blue, Rose belts out, “I like Rock And Roll!” and Dillon fills in the “so put another dime in the jukebox, baby…”

Apparently, Rose isn’t entirely sure how she feels about rock and roll yet.  She’s going to take her time and get to know it before rushing into anything.  Maybe go out for coffee…  nothing serious.

But there are way worse things they could like than Joan Jett.  For instance, it turns out Dillon is a fan of power ballads.  I guess I asked for it…

We got Rock Band and the associated drum kit, guitar, and (a borrowed) microphone, and pretty much everyone is addicted.  The extended family spent a significant amount of time last weekend playing at Dillon’s birthday party (thank goodness I made a sign up sheet), and I haven’t had that much fun watching people play a video game since like, ever.  The kids are getting pretty decent at it, too.  Our immediate family played for a while tonight before Charles left to go to a party at a friend’s house.

"Twenty twenty twenty four hours to go - oh - oh..."

Then I put the kids to bed, created my own band, “The Nerdettes,” populated by Buffy “the Vampire Slayer” Summers, Temperance “Bones” Brennan,  Veronica Mars, and Professor Sheldon Cooper.  I know, it isn’t super original to use TV characters, but it is late, and I just wanted to play video games.  So then I quietly played through two setlists and actually am getting pretty good at beginner easy guitar.  Charles has moved up to medium, and while I am pretty much never in life going to beat him at a video game (unless, I guess, we play chess on an iPad or something), I would really like to be able to hold my own a little bit.  I decided not to practice the drums though since I was pretty sure that might wake up the kids.  Anyway, I imagine I’ll be wasting a bit more time on this in the future…