BenSpark Family Adventures

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00748 Bandai sent us two of their Wave 3 Bandai Digimon devices to try out and review. Opinions are or own. Do you remember the Tamagotchi craze from the 90’s where you had this little Tamagotchi pet in a pocket device. Well, imagine that you now raise that pet to battle other pets. But the pets are Digimon that are little monster that you raise, care for and set out to battle other Digimon. Well, that is what Bandai Digimon are all about. You raise your Digimon from an egg to a child to a full blown Digimon monster. You feed it, train it, clean up after it and then battle other Digimon with it. Not only can you battle random Digimon that show up on your device but you can also link two devices together and battle your friends. This unique toy can be clipped to a backpack so that you are always ready to battle your friends. You can even turn the sound off so as not to get in trouble at school with all the beeps and chirps that come from the device alerting you to...

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00747 The days after Christmas are usually ones where I do a lot of purchases because I ask for gift cards and I use Christmas money to get a lot of the things that I would like. This week some things arrived like the LEGO NES set, some Transformers Funko Pop! figures and I bought some new headphones. These are the Turtle Beach Stealth Gen 2 wireless headphones. The selling point for me is that these headphones can not only connect to my XBox wirelessly but to my cellphone via Bluetooth simultaneously. That means that when I am working from home and using my XBox I can make sure that I do not miss any calls coming in. Before I had to do this by wearing over the ear headphones and in ear Bluetooth ear buds. Not the greatest option but I made it work. I also got these because I run the company switchboard on the weekends and the headset that I received from work was terrible. With a USB adapter I can connect the headset to my work computer and take calls using it a...

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00746 Eva painted this watercolor of her friend today. She just decided that watercolor was what she was going to work with today and she created this. It is a gift for her friend along with a set of books that she got for Christmas, that she already had. I saw them at the comic book store and thought that they would be perfect for Eva. I guess they were because she already had them and really enjoyed them. She’s sharing her enthusiasm for the books with her friend as well as this beautiful watercolor. I have talented kids.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00745 LEGO and Nintendo have been working together this year with a ton of different sets. There is the Super Mario series of LEGO sets that let you play with a LEGO Super Mario as he jumps all over different coded bricks. Another set has emerged and that is the LEGO Nintendo Entertainment set. This one is over 2500 bricks and recreates a LEGO NES console as well as a TV with a working version of Super Mario. There is a crank in the back of the TV that moves the side scrolling game along so that you can make Mario jump and run across the screen. I believe that you can also add the LEGO Super Mario set to the top of the TV. I can’t wait to build this and display it.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00744 For the past several months I have been collecting Funko Pop! figures of the Avengers. The set of six figures connect together to recreate the most iconic moment of the movie, The Avengers. At this point the camera pans around the group of six Avengers as they prepare to take on The Chitauri. This is one of those amazing hero moments that solidifies the group before the battle. The Avengers are united. They ae Assembled! When I first saw this I knew I wanted it and as it got closer I knew exactly how I would display it. I would display it on the Lazy Susan from my Grandmother’s dining room table. We no longer have the table but I kept that Lazy Susan. I was fascinated by it as a kid and that was the only thing I wanted when my Grandparents moved. Now it sits atop a hope chest that is Allison’s in my office. I can freely spin it whenever I’d like to see the Avengers ready themselves for battle. It looks like you can still find this on Amazon except for The H...

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00743 One of the finds that we came across in cleaning out my parent’s house was sticker collections. Back in grade school I was big into collecting stickers. I had a very large collection and then one day part of my collection was stolen at school. It was something that I still think on to this day. The stickers that we discovered during the clean out were probably a compilation of all the collections from myself and my two sisters. I took them home. I removed them all from their sticker books, there were quite a few. I then organized them and started putting them back into a brand new sticker album. They are not the collection I once had but they are pretty impressive overall. I am pretty sure that I have some more around here somewhere in a box or something that I need to go through.

Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00742 A couple ears back I ended a 14 year photo-a-day run bey forgetting to take a photo that day. Being cooped up at home every day during the pandemic has brought challenges to finding interesting things to photograph. I forgot today, but I did take this photo of the game Fenyx Rising while I was playing so that I could solve a riddle in the game. I’ve been playing this game a lot lately and I realize that if I had a cell phone with a camera and could have photographed things along the way in other games I probably could have solved things a lot faster as a kid. However, I probably wouldn not be as good as I am today at solving puzzles when they come up in the games that I am playing now.