Playing WoW with toddlers

I started playing WoW before I had kids, and now I have two children, a 2 year old and a 3 year old and it can be hard to play when family commitments occupy you.

I remember when I had my daughter (she's the older one), when I got home from the hospital, I thought, "Ok this is not so bad, she does sleep a little bit so I can do a few little things here and there".  Back then there wasn't anything like Archaeology that I could do in a few minutes (and I had no farming toons), so I tended to log on and say a few social things and try to attempt a few dungeons with hit and miss success.  And then she got into a pattern and I was raiding again at night time, but then my son came along and I was back to my 5 minute WoW for a bit, but he was a good sleeper so it wasn't long before I was back to raiding again in the evenings.

I don't play WoW much during the day, or at least not seriously.  I only do dailies or quick dungeons (like the holiday bosses), though when my son has his afternoon nap I could occasionally do a dungeon while my daughter occupies herself watching a movie or playing her Dora the Explorer games that she seems to enjoy so much.  It was good for camping rares - I'd leave the computer on with NPCscan volume high so I could hear if a rare was spotted.

The kids do like to watch WoW movies - the vanilla cinematic trailer is a big hit. She likes to see "Snowy Beard and Teddy bear" -

And of course, she likes to see the Night Elf Druid turning into cat form.  My son likes that too.  Gee, I wonder why everyone likes that chick.  It must be umm.. her cat form.  Yeaaaaah.  It's that male thing.  My son has about 10 words that he can say, which include Car, Truck, Plane, Train and... BOOBIES.  Go figure.

The Lich King cinematic trailer is also popular - she always comments while the video is going "He's going to break the ice with his shiny knife so the big dragon will wake up." And when Sindragosa is coming out she will squeal "The big dragon is coming!

Some of the WoW videos I made were popular too - but I suspect the combination of music and content is what makes them enjoy it.  I have a Jingle Bells Christmas one that they both like to watch, which I think is mostly music but the animations are quite amusing with the snowballs and the gnomes dancing.  But they both really like my ICC video that I made to Thriller (Glee version), and they like to dance to it as well.  Which is good because I like that video as well.  Oh, and "The Internet is for Porn" is another favourite - I had a long hiatus from showing them that video because my daughter at around age 2 started saying "Porn, porn, porn" because of that song, and I couldn't let her wander around saying things like that....

So I do schedule their bedtimes at 730ish so I can get down in time for raid at 830pm.  But my daughter now asks if we can play World of Warcraft together at about 7pm, but I have found that she gets a bit hyperactive if I do that, and won't sleep till 9-930pm.  So we play at about 630pm-7pm, where she likes to walk my character around and point at funny things.  Here is what she normally likes to do:

I recently taught her how to dailies!  Hallow's end dailies are quite easy, and she didn't mind doing the bombing, but the one she really liked was cleaning up stink bombs.  I told her, you have to look for the big "smellies", which look like this:

Then I showed her the little "bottle" icon that she has to click so that she can make a green circle, and you have to put the green circle on top of the big smelly to clean it up.

So that was great!  I could leave her in Undercity while I went to cook dinner and when I got back that would be one daily done.

I did try to get her to farm Uldum for me but that was a bit hard.  She kept getting attacked by crocs and other NPCs around nodes, and didn't know how to fight back or fly away.  Give her another few years I reckon and she'll get there.  After all, she can't really read (she is only 3 after all).  I wonder when I have to get her a toon of her own to play.  I'll tell her when she can read then I will let her play World of Warcraft all by herself (after all, if she can't read she can't do the quests right?) :D

To finish, I will just post my favourite funny thing my daughter says about WoW stuff:

"Butterfly" - Lord Marrowgar, ICC