Greetings from Crystalsong Forest, where I’m searching for carrots for the cooking daily. This will likely be all the cooking I’ll do today, as my husband the doctor loves to monopolize the kitchen (and laundry), leaving me little opportunity to show my l33t housewifing skills. So I’ll happily mix up some vegetable stew for Ajay in Cantrips and Crows, who at least rewards me for my cooking abilities.

I’m still trying to live down the incredible shame of my noobishness in Wednesday’s Ulduar raid. Asking about which button to spam as the tank gunner is bad enough; learning that we wiped because I’ve been spamming the wrong button is horrendous. Next fight: asking the directions again and again and finally having someone else pick up the slack makes me want to run away screaming and clean something or cuddle my kids, anything that I can at least do reasonably well and not let down the whole raid once again. But as much as I worry, the fact is that even with my noobish, undergeared self, we downed Emalon, the Flame Leviathan, Razorscale and the Deconstructor that day and I was kindly awarded a new epic. I wanted to roll for another, but my dagger skill wasn’t high enough….wait, you say; dagger skill doesn’t matter for a caster? Well, I was informed that by a laughing guild on Vent, so I did roll but lost, which means that I’m stuck with the Chilly Slobberknocker for a little while longer.

My guild is awesome. Casual, mature, accepting and family-friendly (meaning no cussing if the kids are around), they are happy to bring along an undergeared noob so they can at least have some sort of attempt at the newest 10-man. I am humbled to be given the chance to work with the uberleet and being allowed to tickle the bosses with my scanty dps. While I feel much more comfortable as a casually RPing Helpy Helperton, I do like to experiment with such sentences as “Not now; Mommy’s raiding” and “Get your own sandwich; I’m in Naxx and I’ve only got 26 minutes on my Flask of the Frost Wyrm.”

Sure, if the kids get on I’ll help them level a bit or quest with them. My fourteen year old has a 73 lock and my eleven year old has a 63 DK. My twenty-eight year old has attained level 80 and tanked a couple of heroics on his druid. My plan for the summer involves encouraging the little ones to revisit their own addictions so I won’t have to hear the whining about boredom. But I have mixed feelings about that, especially when school starts up again and I have to worry about someone not doing his book report because he’s been playing 5 hours of TF2 a day (yes, yes; send me back to parenting school, I know).

About addiction and slackery: We only allow a certain amount of that in the house. We do tend to focus on things that decrease stress, which is why we all spend a lot of time on the computers (one for each family member) and not a lot of time schlepping kids to afterschool activities. The kids have friends, they do well in school, they have outside interests (fencing, volunteering at the animal shelter, rock climbing), so I feel that despite my parental slackery they’re doing pretty well. It may come as a surprise that I spent about five years badgering my older son about his video game addiction. Yes, it has come back to bite me in the a%$ (profanity filter on). I’m surprised he doesn’t bring up my Wowlove every chance he gets. He now hears from me, “Get on, we need to run some heroics to get geared up” or “Heal me in a BG now plskthx”. I’ve heard mixed things from the kids – mostly they seem to like the fact that I play, but occasionally they hear from one of their friends that I’m a freak or crazy (can’t deny the second but that’s neither here nor there). The only problem seems to come when I’m in an instance when they’re around. When I’m in an instance, I find it very hard to pay attention to the outside world. I don’t even hear people talking to me half the time, which is fine if you’re a twenty-year-old college student, but doesn’t work well when kids are asking you if they can go to their friends’ houses or husbands want to find out if you’ll be done in time for dinner.

So for now, raiding will be done while kids or in school or when I’m at the local internet cafe. Where perhaps I’ll meet another level 80 housewife, or at least someone over 25. Maybe I can force the kids to get jobs that require their presence every weekday morning. Or petition for the pool to install wifi…