Looking for advice from parents: Gaming with baby

[Mythmere1]

Chiming in with consensus, but yes, babies are easy - toddlers make you have to game after bedtime only. Which isn't a problem unless you're used to marathon game sessions.

You just lose marathon (5+ hours) games sessions with kids, that's all - unless there's someone watching the kids for you.

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

Chiming in with consensus, but yes, babies are easy - toddlers make you have to game after bedtime only. Which isn't a problem unless you're used to marathon game sessions.

Or if you have night owl/light sleeping children like mine.

 

[The_Universe]

When we first found our current group, one of the couple therein had just had a baby - he wasn't a problem at all, in fact. Kids cry, and I didn't mind when one or both of them needed to excuse themselves from the table to attend to their child. It is, after all, just a game.

The only problem the child produced was that the parents decided they didn't like hauling him to the game location, and the rest of the group (myself included) was unwilling to haul ourselves out to the place where they lived every week or two. So, we parted gaming ways.

 

[Rackhir]

I know Wizardru and his wife scheduled game sessions to start around the time they'd put the kids to sleep. Of course this does mean that games could easily go until 1 am or so.

 

[The Shaman]

We put our 1-y.o. to bed before we start playing our twice-monthly tabletop game - game-time usually lasts from eight p.m. to about eleven or so on the first and third Saturdays.

She's too mobile and too inquisitive for us to try to play while she's awake. Newborns are a snap - it's when the blessed anklebiters start crawling that you have to adjust your habits, IMX.

 

[deadestdai]

My 6-month old comes to gaming with me every two weeks or so. As has been said above, it wasn't that much of a difficulty. Babies that age tend to sleep a lot, so he really didn't interfere with the flow of things much at all. Now he's active as heck and I just bring his doorway jumper with me and he's kept as happy as ever with a break or five for changing and food preparation.

A second wee one is soon to be born to our group and so she'll be involved the same way. Babies and gaming work out fine if you game with adults (Who tend to be a little more patient with such things), with teenagers or children? Hrm - I have no experience with this, but I can guess it'd be a little different and not so "easy".

 

[billd91]

My experiences of gaming with babies is roughly the same. They're pretty easy as newborns because they either sleep or nurse a lot and that keeps them quiet and relatively still. My wife found that she was too tired all the time to really focus on the game though. So she tended to be a half-interested player until she finally dropped out of that particular game.
Toddlers require a lot more attention. Figure on only one of the couple being really 'there' until that toddler goes down for bed. And hope that the rest of the players are tolerant enough to play most sessions at the parents' home, it's much easier that way.
Once they're past toddler stage, they still need a lot of individual attention unless there are other kids to play with. So continue to figure on one of the couple being only partly there until the kid is old enough to concentrate on the game console/PC/bunch of DVDs for long stretches.

 

[Dingleberry]

What to do with the baby isn't the only issue: don't forget that you'll be dealing with your own sleep deprivation and having let other things slide (e.g., household chores). You might end up feeling that if you have time to do something, you might want to use it to catch up on sleep or other stuff instead of rolling dice. In other words, gaming might get knocked down a few on the priority list, at least for a while. I know I was fighting that for the first few gaming sessions after we had our baby (six months old tomorrow!).

That all said, it's VERY important to do what you can to relieve stress - you'll have plenty.

 

[brehobit]

I'll add a bit.

Our child was pretty difficult until she was 3-4 months old. This greatly limited our options with respect to just about everything. Certainly my wife and I allowed her to restrict us a lot more than we should have, but at the same time a bad day (and they were common) would have driven everyone crazy.

In otherwords, you will probably get away with gaming with the baby around, but you may find you have to rotate who gets to game and who gets to stay home with the kid. Plan for both....

 

[Mercule]

A lot of it is the attitude of the parents. We never had a problem with our first. My wife would duck behind the couch when it was time to nurse, but otherwise no big. When the second came along, it was a bit more -- switch off tasks until their bedtimes match up, then a bit of extra time tucking them in, etc.

The real challenge is that we've now got three under five and I'm the GM, so my wife is on her own. Only the last month or so has been bad, with the youngest needing needing fed the first half-hour and the last half-hour, with bedtime for the other two midway through. She's missed a chunk of the game the last 3-4 sessions, but we were largely doing in-town/downtime/bookkeeping stuff. Soon enough, though, the feeding schedule will change again, with more solids, and an earlier bedtime (about the same as the others), so we may be able to just call a mid-point break and tag-team all the kids.