It has been said that our life, the life that we really strive for, is made of a series of moments. I definitely see this to be the case, and this Spring, Loreen, Jared and I added a few moments to our 'timeline' as Mark Z would call it. However, before we get in the 'the moments' we should backup just a bit since our new moments were experienced on Jared's Graduation trip to Runaway Bay, Jamaica and this warrants some background.

As with most kids nowadays, Jared started showing an interest in video games very early in life. At about 1 year old, he would join his siblings in front of the TV with a NES controller in his hand and play along with them. He was fortunately oblivious to the fact that his siblings were reluctant to actually plug his controller into the console but this appeared to be totally fine with Jared.

Somewhere around three years old, I guess around the time of the photo above, Jared actually started plugging in and he quickly became hooked on the big Nintendo titles like, Mario Brothers, Yoshi and Zelda that are now legendary in the gaming industry. As we were busy with Zack and Kaitlin's activities and school work, I must admit that we were happy to allow him probably too much time enjoying these games.
 
As a somewhat related matter, we often hear the debate about how computer games are a negative factor in child development but our experience was quite the contrary. Shortly after moving to Toronto, in 1997, when Jared was three and a half years old, and long before he started Kindergarten, I walked into the Family Room and saw Jared with a pen and paper copying down words that were shown on the TV screen. I asked him what he was doing and he said, "I am taking down these words because I will have to enter them on another screen to get access to other rooms." (and yes, that is the way Jared talked at 3 years old). And so Jared began to read and write before well school and without our help. 

Two years after that, when Jared was 5 and was in Junior Kindergarten, I had started building our Rec Room in the basement. After his bath, Jared would come down and play in the construction rubble with his 'Mens' as he called them.

While he was downstairs with me, he would talk my ear off about the games that he would develop and the levels and bosses that would be in the game. What impressed me most was the depth of his vision into the development and marketing of these games. One of his 'ramblings' that I remember most clearly went something like this:  "...And after I develop the game, I'm going to make some comic books with the characters in them and bring to my friends at school so they will want to get the game. And then I'm going make the little characters from the game and go to McDonald's and ask them to put them in the Kid's Meal bags." As an entrepreneur myself, I was amazed how this 5-year-old was able to understand the integration of the different mediums of video games, comic books and merchandising so early in his 'career'.  

It was only about 2 years after this that Loreen found an advertisement in our local newspaper for Real Programming 4 Kids (that still operates today) promoting a way to teach kids how to program through the medium of gaming. While the requirement was that the students had to be 8 years old to get into the program, because of the math concepts that were used in programming, we were able to convince the owner to admit Jared and he began programming in Visual Basic at the age of 7.      

So let's fast forward back to the recent past. After 4 years at University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT) in Oshawa, Jared is graduating with a Bachelor of Information Technology with a Major in Game Development and Entrepreneurship. To celebrate this, we decided to let him choose location for a grad trip and we eventually decided on Runaway Bay, Jamaica and we would stay at a resort that both Kaitlin and Zack had stayed at previously.