She handled the division of Jill's attention between her and Alex with surprising grace. She did maneuver for extra attention, of course (she's a 5-year-old, not a saint) but she managed to do it without an excess of whining or bad behavior. Mostly, she would sidle up and play with both Jill and Alex for a bit, and then say, "Grandma, would you like to come upstairs and play in my room?"
Jill obliged her a few times, since she'd gotten her quota of time with Alex while Penny was next door playing with Ray.
And Alex, of course, is still too young to understand when he's been ditched. He was a little uncertain about Jill at first, but he warmed up to her pretty quickly. (He's a sucker for being tickled.)
I'd known Jill would be excited by Alex's advances -- he was only 5 weeks old when she saw him last, after all -- but the thing that I hadn't really considered until she got here was the change in Penny.
The last time Jill was here was the weekend Penny was diagnosed with diabetes. She'd been listless and unable to muster enthusiasm even for her beloved Grandma Jill, even for making cookies with Grandma Jill (which was the activity I'd tried to tempt her with). Even after we'd gotten her to the hospital and she started improving, she will still pretty sick, and was nowhere near a normal energy level.
So seven months later, with Penny back to normal and full of life and verve, with the boundless energy and nonstop chatter -- it must have been a wonderful contrast for Jill.
I finally found the time last night to really immerse myself in the WoW beta -- I'd picked up an "exotic" pet for my hunter over the weekend and had fun running it around, but last night I made a Death Knight, which is the new class they're introducing.
I'd have screenshots for you, but Alex was being a fusspot this morning, so I didn't get a chance to upload any. But holy crap is it amazing.
I have some suggestions for improving the first few quests so you get a better feel for what your abilities are, but you can tell they've lavished a lot of attention on this - the whole starting area is scattered with incidental details (like readable books) that really lend to the atmosphere.
And they waste no time in letting you know that you're amongst the bad guys. The first thing I was told to do, after leaving the citadel, was to slaughter hapless peasants. And they really are hapless -- unless you use the ability that forces your target to fight for a few seconds, they just quiver in fear and beg while you strike them down.
(I have to say, it made filling out the quest surveys a little weird. "How fun was this quest - Not at all; A little fun; Pretty fun; or A lot of fun?" Er... is "immersive enough to make me feel uncomfortable" an option? In case you're wondering, I rated it "a lot of fun" on the theory that the point of the quest, from a game/storyline perspective, was to make me feel uncomfortable, and it had accomplished that quite well. But like I said, it felt kind of weird.)
So I spent an hour and a half last night slaughtering innocents, stealing their livestock for my own fell purposes, turning them into ghouls, and dueling with my fellow death knights. The duel quest had an interesting twist - the quest requires you to win 5 duels against other death knights, but for those of us who suck at PvP, there are NPC death knights who fight with game AI. I did accept the player duels offered to me, but I uniformly lost those -- not having a mouse is a big handicap in PvP. I did better than I expected to, though, generally getting my opponents down to the 5% mark.
And I'll probably do it again tonight. Mua-ha-ha.
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