#russellfam

[jamierussell]

Look who learned to ride a bike today!

[jamierussell]

Russell’s Visit the Burmuda Triangle

My son Max is totally freaked out by the idea of the Bermuda Triangle.  That said, we found ourselves in the Bahanma’s on Spring Break on a Disney Cruise trip and went snorkeling at this little obscure remote island and had a blast! Once back home I was looking at where we were on Google Maps and noticed the “Bermuda Triangle” tag right next to the tiny island we snorkeled around.  Max freaked when we showed him. If we had been filming is reaction we would be famous right now...

[jamierussell]

Parenting MineCraft Style: MineCraft 101

I am beginning a multi-part blog series on this game loathed by parents around the globe known as MineCraft. It simply cannot be thoroughly covered in one post, it’s too complex and intricate of a topic.

A Parental Intro to Minecraft My children have finally found a game that I simply can’t get into. I was even that parent that said it wrong. I kept calling it “mind" craft and was quickly corrected by my seven year old that it is “mine" craft!!! So make sure you get it right.

Mining with Steve In short, here’s how I ‘think’ Minecraft works. You embody a pixelated character named "Steve" (also my father-in-laws name so that can get confusing enough) and are given a pickaxe where you begin digging out caves and building structures with various earth type blocks all within a virtual world. When "mining" you can find minerals for rewards like iron, gold, quartz, coal, obsidian, and the coveted diamonds (more posts to come on these). The graphics are all very rudimentary pixelated and bitmappy but they evidently get the job done. The kids don't seam to "mind"... see what I did there.

Creative Mode vs. Survival Mode There are two modes, creative mode and survival mode. In creative mode you can build stuff (buildings, trees, farms) with different types of building blocks. In survival mode you can run around and dig to find minerals and kill farm animals (I have heard some parents who do not allow the killing of animals) for health as the sun circles the virtual world creating day and night. But whatever you do… DON’T MINE AT NIGHT!

Don't Mine at Night! At night… the “Creepers" come out. I have literally heard my kids scream bloody murder being scared by these things. I think there are also Zombie’s of some kind and other types of bad guys that can take your life and make you lose all the items you have collected. This can be devastating depending on how hard your child has worked to collect these things.

There you have it, your intro to the game. However we haven’t even scratched the surface of what this game can do in the family dynamic. Stay tuned for more parental insights to MindCraft. Oops, I meant Minecraft!

[jamierussell]

This is the Russell Family web site... my family.  The amazing thing about this site to me is that my family has no printed photo albums... we have it all on this site.  It is an old install of a Coppermine Photo Gallery.  My wife Stephanie Russell posts all pictures by month and captions them appropriately.  This also houses her "Steph's Blog" where she has been logging our activities for years.

NOTE: The one thing I am responsible for is to update the home page graphic and it does not happen very often.

You can also get to this site with the following domain names.

- http://www.maxrussell.com - http://www.zekerussell.com - http://www.blakerussell.com (full .com domain names are required for all Russell offspring)