BenSpark Family Adventures

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00821 When the most recent LEGO catalog arrived I saw this new thing called VIDIYO which is a LEGO set that works with an app so kids can make LEGO music videos. I figured that Andy would enjoy that. He loves music and singing and LEGO.There are 6 in total but I picked up 3 that I figured Andy would like the most. One of the DJs is a Llama. I am looking forward to playing these together with him.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00820 Because of the close contact COVID scare Eva had to remain out of school until Wednesday of this week. So, once she was done with her online classes she spent her time on a little personal art project. She printed out an image and then proceeded to paint it with pastels and water colors. I didn’t realize how many she made this afternoon. Each one totally unique, too. Her creativity continues to amaze me.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00819 Our COIVD tests came back negative so we are in the clear at this point. Because of that I was able to go and get my first vaccine today. My vaccine was administered at Gillette Stadium in the Putnam Club, a special VIP club at the stadium and it overlooks the field. I have only been in the stadium once before and that was for a Jimmy Buffet concert years ago and we were WAY up there on the bleachers. way up there. The view from The Putnam club was really nice. Everything went pretty well for the vaccination. Things were very well organized and the actual shot was quick and painless. Then I had to sit for 15 minutes in case there was any reaction. I had no reaction but lots of things go through your mind as you sit there. Am I feeling strange? But, I was okay and was able to get there and get back, get my next appointment too and was done. One month from now I’ll be fully vaccinated.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00818 The morning started with a COVID-19 test for me and Eva. That was a horrible feeling. Eva handled is much better than I did. There was a close contact in Eva’s class so for the next few days our plans are all messed up. I am getting my first vaccine shot tomorrow and I had to rule out whether or not I had the virus. For dessert tonight we had cake. Andy asked Allison if he could bake a cake and in a moment of weakness she relented and let him make one. He did the design of the cake himself. Choose the frosting colors and all that and added the Hershey’s kisses. So the frosting is black on top, or slightly gray and for some reason we had some valentine’s day frosting left over. It is a cake just because.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00817 Today is Auntie Tara’s birthday and because of that the kids usually sing her Happy Birthday on her voice mail. This year I recorded a video of them singing and well, it turned into a giggle-fest. Once someone starts laughing it makes it harder and harder to get an actual video recorded. so when we finally got a decent one done we sent that and also sent all the bloopers. There was one where when they got to “Auntie Tara” Andy looked like a deer in the headlights because he said the wrong name. Such a moment of panic. Also, Eva is wearing Auntie Tara’s pants and decided to dress as a pirate. Andy, not wanting to be left out went up and put on his suit to be a life insurance salesman. These silly kiddos.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00816 Andy continues to make some really great clay figures. Today he made a few including an Easter themed Snoopy for his teacher. He knows that she likes Snoopy so he decided to use his clay to make her one of his clay creations. Andy is not the only creative one in the house. Eva decided that she would paint her dice tower for Dungeons and Dragons today. This is a build your own dice tower and she must have found it while cleaning and decided that today would be a good day to paint it. I can’t wait to see it finished. Today we also hung our 15th Wedding Anniversary gift to ourselves up in our bedroom. We were going to hang it in the hallway but there were no real good places to do this so it now hangs on the way next to my side of the bed. It is an original piece of artwork of hand drawn lyrics to our wedding song. The art was created by Ellis Paul who is also the singer/songwriter of our wedding song called ‘Words’. We then had this framed at my cousin Matt’s...

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00815 On this National Waffle Day we had diner from a new local restaurant called The Burgundian. Prior to there being a physical location there was a food truck Now The Burgundian is located in downtown Attleboro in a location where there has been several different restaurants. I think we have tried them all over time. Tonight was all about the waffles, though. They have all sorts of specialty waffles but my favorite is Chicken and Waffles. There was also a maple bacon one and one called In Bacon we trust with a special fig jam. Allison enjoyed that one to herself as the rest of us do not enjoy fig. They have a nice system over there and the food was ready right on time. It was hot and so good!

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00814 I do love new equipment days. Today my new Ring Light arrived and I a planning on doing another year of daily vlogs. Now that I have a bigger audience on YouTube I figured I’d work on growing that some more with additional content. For a while now my content has pretty much been all about Fortnite. I enjoy it and it has been bringing people to come and subscribe but that isn’t the only thing that I want the channel to be about. So the Ring Light is HUGE! It has all of these hot shoe slots so that I can attach my camera, a cell phone and more. It is actually much righter than my umbrella lights that I use for making gaming videos. I can adjust this, too by turning it up or down or increasing or decreasing the warmth of the light. So, I can go for super bright white to a warm yellow. This ring light will come in handy when I am making unboxing videos, too. The umbrella lights are good but don’t throw enough light all the way out to the futon. When I unbox som...

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00813 Today was Stripe Test for Me, Eva and Andy. I had mine in the morning and that gives me 3 stripes on my Red Belt with another 3 months to go before moving to Advanced Red. Andy got 3 on his Advanced Brown belt and in another three months will move to Red Belt. Eva is on a three month track now and that means that she has earned her Purple Belt and will receive it on Thursday. She’s been doing a great job in Krav. She got off the mats today and started reading her book. I looked over and saw that she had scraped some skin off one of her knuckles. She’s hitting pretty hard for that to happen. She didn’t even notice. Andy did well in his stripe test, too. while he doesn’t take it as seriously as his sister, he’s still improving every class. It took me a long time to really see that in him. I tend to only see the goofing around. I’m trying to pay more attention to how he’s improving.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00812 Funko sent me a free TNTina Funko Pop! figure to unbox and review. Opinions are my own. Back in Chapter 2 Season 2 of Fortnite a new group of characters were introduced including a character with an affinity for the Boom Bow, a dynamite tipped bow and arrow. Her name was TNTina and she was found at an oil rig (great combination for disaster). She was a boss character and you had to defeat her in order to get the boom bow. Now it is season 6 of the game and I have this TNTina Pop! figure which ties perfectly into a quest that Agent Jonesy is doing. He finds a vault that has the door slightly ajar. On the wall is written Boom just like it is on TNTina’s shirt. There are also several propane tanks that also say boom on them found in the area. Your job is to pick them all up and put them into the vault and then set them off so that the resulting explosion opens the vault doo enough for you to investigate. I made a video about it today. Funko did a great job wit...

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00811 Back in 1986 America was head over heels for Paul Hogan in Crocodile Dundee. Australia became a huge thing and Australian characters popped up in several tv shows, movie and cartoons. In 1990 Betty Crocker debuted an Australian sounding snack with a kangaroo mascot, named Sydney, called Dunkaroos. These snacks held about 10 cookies and frosting for dunking the cookies. The name was a portmanteau or Dunk and Kangaroo. I was at a local grocery store today and I saw them so I picked up a few packages, one for everyone in the house, so the kids could also enjoy this sweet treat from when I was younger.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00810 Funko sent me four of their Fortnite Funko Pop! figures for free so that I could unbox and review them. Opinions are my own. I have been playing Fortnite for a while now, at least a couple of years at this point. It started because I had written an article for The Toy Insider and if I was going to write about the game I had better play it. So I started playing. Then I began making gameplay videos and I have been doing that ever since. The Fortnite Gameplay videos are what has been generating the most traffic on my YouTube Channel. So, for some future videos I will unbox each of these Funko Pop! figures. Three of them are figures of characters that were part of Chapter 2, Season 2 of the game. Right now we just started Chapter 2, Season 6. The other figure is of a character from Season X from Chapter 1. It is very fun how Funko made these characters. They look fantastic with great detail. They even got the freckles on TNTina. I also discovered this skit from...

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00809 After dinner tonight Allison went to visit her friend, Colleen. The kids entertained themselves as I had to work. Lately they have been watching the series called Steven Universe on Hulu. It is a show that Eva got into first and then let Andy watch it with her. Tonight they watched a few episodes together and they were getting along really well. That I like to see.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00808 We received a free copy of Alone by Megan R. Freeman to read and review. Opinions are our own. We all know that Eva is a voracious reader. She is never without a book in hand. So she is my go to for reading Young Adult novels and letting me know what she thinks of them. In this instance we both read Alone. We also both enjoyed the book. This book is a little different than many you will read because it is a novel-in-verse and is pretty short overall. The minimalist use of words to tell this story adds to how alone our protagonist, Maddie is in the world. Things do not start out that way. This is not some post apocalyptic world overrun by hordes of zombies or monsters. This is a sleepy town in Colorado where one day Maddie wakes up and she is completely alone. No other soul is around except for a dog named George. the story is about how Maddie survives through the years completely on her own. How she finds food and shelter. How she deals with growing up by h...

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00807 We had a nice Sant Patrick’s Day meal tonight after Eva’s Krav Class. This year we boiled two corned beef cuts. We did Point cut in Guinness with the veggies in the crock pot all day. In another crock pot we had flat cut with Killian’s Red and all the veggies except for the cabbage. That was put in later. We decided that we enjoy eating the point cut for the meal but the flat is much better for making corned beef hash the next day because it stays together better than the point which is stringy and falls apart. But now we definitively know what to choose. After dinner we had some Pot ‘O gold cookies that the Leprechaun left for us. Andy observed that when we don’t leave out traps the Leprechaun leaves us treats. He did leave us some mischief, too like green milk and green toilet water. Eva mentioned to Allison that “the Leprechaun” should stir the milk up a lot more. I like that she keeps the magic alive for Andy. The image above was from Andy’s schoolwork ...

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00806 At Karate they have these break away boards that kids get to break during class on occasion. It is a great way for the kids to keep motivated and feel like they are doing some really cool stuff. Andy broke his board on the second try. I was recording this on video in the mirrors so it is a bit grainy and far away. Hard to get a good shot with the phone this way but I can at least pick the frame I want and got the moment of impact. Tonight Eva helped me talk about a video series that we love. It is called The Legend of Korra and we recently received a great Steelbook of DVDs that had the whole series and lots of amazing commentary. We discussed it in the video below.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00805 Today was the last day Chapter 2 Season 5 of Fortnite. I think this was by far my favorite season because of all of the great tie-ins with so many different properties that I enjoy like G.I. JOE, Terminator, Alien and so many others. I had a great tie making videos this season and they appear to have really taken off. I am working really hard to make content for my viewers. People seem to enjoy my easygoing style and way of talking in the videos but they really are responding to my replying to all comments. I start making Season 6 videos tomorrow. The video below as my last one of the season.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00804 Eva is back at crafting. This time she has taken some hand-me-down shoes and added embroidery floss and some butterfly shaped buttons to give some flair to the old shoes. She was working on this tonight and may have more to go but she was pretty close to being finished with them.

Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00803 Don’t ask me where this kid comes up with his ideas. I know that he likes to entertain people and make them laugh. Tonight he got all dressed in his karate sparring gear including the mouth guard. This kid is a nut sometimes. Of course he doesn’t always pick up on the best times for his shenanigans. He usually pulls this kind of thing when we are in the middle of anything else. Tonight Eva and I were trying to watch a Blu-ray for review before I headed to work. So, it is the perfect time for Andy to bust in with his silliness. Or, at least, he thinks that way.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00802 This year was our 15th wedding anniversary. We were going to go away for the weekend for a big comedy show at Foxwoods and also for a spa day, too. Well, we all know what happened with this year and plans. Instead of that we decided to get something for ourselves that was meaningful to us. Our wedding song is a song called Words by singer songwriter Ellis Paul. Ellis has been doing a ton of live shows on Facebook Live and Patreon. He is also a pretty talented visual artist and he offered for people to buy hand written song lyrics and we decided that we’d like to have Words written out so that we could frame it. The artwork arrived back in November but we haven’t had a time where we were both around to go to Preservation Framer to decide on a frame for the artwork. My cousin, Matt owns Preservation Framer and his team does a fantastic job with everything that they frame. We went in and picked out a frame, matte and accent matte. We’re very excited for the fi...

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00801 I am doing a Twitter Party tomorrow for the EggMazing Egg Decorator. This is a great egg decorating tool for Easter. If you want to participate in the Twitter Party you have to RSVP and you can do that at https://bit.ly/EggmazingParty. I went out yesterday and picked up some white eggs for the Egg Decorator. Andy was thrilled because he got to have hard boiled eggs for breakfast, that is, after we decorated them first. This device is really useful for egg decorating. You get the device plus 8 special markers. Mine came out pretty awesome. We might make more of them tomorrow. before the Twitter Party.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00800 I have added more to my office display. I took the POP Pez dispensers that I had packed away in the attic and put them on the hope chest, too. I’m going to have to figure out more ways to display more of my collections, or at least the best things from my collections.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00799 Today we received The Legend of Korra – The Complete Series Limited Edition Steelbook Collection from Paramount home Entertainment nd Nickelodeon for free for a review that we will be doing soon. Opinions are our own. The Legend of Korra is one of Eva’s all time favorite cartoon series. She watched it before me and has devoured every bit of information about the series that she can. I knew that this Steelbook Collection would be the most perfect thing for her, so I requested it and emphasized how much Eva knows about the show. And now I know a ton about it too. We both watched the full series and now we are re-watching it with the commentary on. We watched 3 of the episodes tonight and if neither of us had to sleep we would have watched even more. We’ll be doing a full video review of the set and all the great features included soon. Today I just wanted to mention that the actual physical steelbooks are so beautiful. The entire set together and the artwork ...

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00798 On Sunday Night Allison came to me and let me know that our hot water heater was spraying water into the basement. I was in the middle of my Sunday Night Group Meeting from Work and had to jet out quickly to go an shut off the water to the hot water heater. I have since shown Allison how to do it in case it ever happens again. It shouldn’t for a long time since we had the old one replaced today. I called our plumber and left him a message and sent him a text, however, the only number I had was a home phone and that answering machine gets checked at night and there is no way a text went through. So, I am fortunate that my mom is one of the only people reading this blog these days. She let me dad know and Dad had the super secret cell phone of our plumber and called him and got him over to the house this afternoon. Our plumber came, took a look at the hot water heater and went out to pick another one up at the supply store, came back and installed it. Hauled ...

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00797 Andy had to make a nature habitat for an animal for a school project. He choose to make a habitat for a wolf. He used his skills with modeling clay to make stones and logs and a bit of water and then he colored in the backdrop and used a wolf that we had gotten from Safari Limited a few years back. He did a lot of work on everything and it looks really good, too. I hope that he does well on it. We had a bit of excitement tonight. Allison came up around 11pm to let me know that the hot water heater was spraying water everywhere. I hopped off my Zoom meeting for work with a quick explanation and then headed downstairs to shut the water off. I’m not sure how long it was running but we had to do about an hours worth of cleaning to Mop up the water and clear out everything that had gotten wet. Luckily I have been pretty obsessive over not having cardboard boxes in the basement. There were a few that got wet but we were pretty lucky overall. Now, I guess we can k...

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00796 Andy has been taking an Outschool class for working with clay. This Christmas he got a bunch of clay and he’s been making all sorts of things. The other day he gave me a clay gnome. Today he made these two clay bunnies. I think he was supposed to be making baby chicks because he made the bunnies in yellow. He also said that he was making baby chicks earlier in the day. But, they’re bunnies and he did a really nice job on them. I think today was his last class. He’s enjoyed classes but he wants to do more of his own thing. He’s very much one who moves to his own beat. Today is National Oreo day. It is one of those days that makes me a little bit sad that I am not working in the office. I enjoy being able to bring in special foods for national days. It made everyone happy. Well, my new office is home and I went and got some special Oreos to make the family happy here. The kids liked the hazelnut ones because they are huge Nutella fans. I still like the origin...

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00795 Super Impulse provided us with free samples of their Wacky Packages Minis. Opinions are our own. One of the most creative mailers came my way the other day. Super Impulse sent me a mailer that was like a a takeout box complete with a coffee stained receipt. Inside was a take out box complete with a Wacky Packages napkin plus fork and also one of the new packages of series 2 Wacky Packages Minis. This collection of 3D puny products features 82 new parody items for you to unbox, collect and chase! Now there are THREE levels of rare for you to collect – Rare, Really Rare and Fuggetaboutit! You can see which ones I got in my unboxing video below. In collaboration with Topps, each Wacky Packages Mini comes with 5 mini figures, a sticker with original art from 1967 and a collector’s guide! Whether you are playing a game of Dims on your PC or snacking on some Frosted Snakes, these Wacky Packages Minis will satisfy your every craving. Available now at Target and la...

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00794 Andy created a clay gnome for everyone in the family. He gave me the blue one and it now lives with some other little knick-knacks on top of my “Game Over” sign. I also found a LEGO minifig that looks most like me that I used to use for old Built from Bricks videos and photos.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00793 We were up early this morning because of this guy. He decided to show what a good hunter he was by bringing Eva a dead mouse. The mouse, however, was not one that he caught. No, James brought the mouse up still in the trap that had caught it. So, Eva came into our room and told us, “James brought a dead mouse in a trap up to my room.” This was at 5:45am What a way to start the day. So I took a photo of James and added the caption to it.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00792 The folks at PlayMonster sent me six of their new Snap ships Fusion sets for free to play with and review. Opinions are my own. Snap Ships came out last year and in that time they released a bunch of cool looking space ships that you can quickly and easily snap together. The toy not only launched with they toys but also with a YouTube channel and cartoon and an AR enabled app. So there is a lot coming from Snap Ships. This year they launched a new group of Snap Ships but they are much smaller in scale and they are all about combining builds to make better and better ships. I was sent 6 unique drones. There were 3 Forge ones and 3 Komplex ones. the Forge are the good guys and The Komplex are the bad guys. I have foudn that I really like the look of The Komplex ships over that of The Forge ships. Better colors and details on Komplex ships. I’m not as much of a fan of The Forge. So I received these six sets. Snap Ships K-Crawler Suppression Mech (Komplex) Snap...

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00791 I do my laundry once a week, separate from the rest of the family. I started doing this several years ago so that I always knew where my clothes were. especially the socks. We have this basket of odds and ends socks and I just wanted to keep my own socks out of that mess. And if my socks aren’t in the pile then I don’t need to sort them. That is a ob for the kids. Instead of starting a new row of t-shirts. I have three rows of shirts that are in rotation I decided to wear something that I have not worn in forever. It is a 2XL sleeveless sweatshirt that I got form Loot Crate. It is of the Scarlet Spider. I wore that over a long sleeve Loki shirt that I also got in a Loot Crate. Both are a bit too big for me now. The hood of the sweatshirt is enormous!