I’m not sure I know what Marissa’s true personality is- she’s had so many.  Rage Marissa presents during ACTH and now half of the time during this phenobarbitol withdrawal.  Happy Marissa is popping up now, in a sort of bipolar way when she’s not complaining about the withdrawal.  We’ve seen tolerant/stoned Marissa during the peak of her medication during a previous wean.  Cuddly Marissa coos at us off and on.  These days, Marissa’s crabby during the day, but settles down in the afternoon and is generally happy.  Some of the tonic seizures are returning though, as we just reduced her phenobarbitol dose.

High impact parenting is hard.  There’s no protective gear, no formations, no scrimmages.  There’s really only two people that can play full time, and if you’re lucky like us, there’s a few short time substitutes that can be tagged in from time to time.  When the game starts, the clock doesn’t stop, and to misappropriate a phrase, the Red Cross has to take the wounded off the field.  Easing some of the contact and reducing the amount of time I have to spend in the penalty box due to excessive crabbiness, both children are sleeping fairly well as of late.  The sleep is coming as a result of a few factors- I’ll elaborate on one of them next week sometime.  So, I’m not currently physically tired but I can’t shake the emotional fatigue I think I just shoulder without truly dealing with it every day.

Enough with the navel gazing, let’s give some stuff away!

Over the spring, Microsoft ran a promotion where if you purchased all four DLC items, then you’d get some sort of rebate.  I didn’t buy all four, as they didn’t all appeal, but one I did get and come back to from time to time.  Toy Soldiers by Signal Studios was the game that was by far my favorite from that lot.

Most of the readers here are video gamers.  Toy Soldiers, even though not advertised as such is basically a tower defense game, with a catch.  Rather than sitting back and evaluating your defenses, the player can leap into one of the built turrets and blast away at whatever target they see fit!  I terribly suck at the game, and probably always will.  Real time strategy, including hybrids like the excellent Toy Soldiers make my brain lock a bit, and I can’t ever quite figure out the rock, paper, scissors Rochambeau game mechanic convention like I can in a shooter.

I happily purchased the game on it’s initial release.  The developer has provided me three codes for the core game, and three codes for the new expansion pack!  There’s one three-step process to enter this contest.

Step One:

Vote for Marissa’s Bunny on topbabyblogs.com by clicking here.  No registration is required.  If you don’t want to click on the text, the banner at the bottom of the page works too.

Step Two:

On the landing page, be sure to get your vote counted by clicking on the “click here and your vote will be added” text.

Step Three:

Email Marissa and tell us you’ve done this.

That’s it!  You can perform these steps once per day for additional entries.  Entry in the contest gives us permission to use whatever name you’ve provided us, whether it be your real name or your screen name for winner announcement purposes.  We won’t harvest your email address, ever, or sell them, ever.  Entries close on July 20th at Noon eastern standard time.  Three winners will be chosen, and each winner gets the code for the game, and the DLC.  If you don’t need the core game, we’ll happily re-give the game, but that’s up to the winner.  Codes work anywhere xBox Live services, and is (obviously at this point) for the xBox 360 version.

Good luck!  More giveaways coming!