If your child or children are like my oldest son when it comes to vegetables, I’m sorry. I lament with you. It’s no fun having a child who is horribly opposed to vegetables. So when MomCentral asked if I wanted to review Hidden Valley’s Veggie Adventures game and their Love Your Veggies site, I kind of laughed in a knowing way. I’ll do anything to help this kid eat vegetables, games included! Glad to see someone knows about parents and children like us and has decided to help us out!

We started out with their “At the Farm” game where you have to grow your veggies. BigBrother started out with a field full of veggies, some of which he doesn’t like at all and some of which he does (carrots are acceptable in case you were wondering). As the game started, bugs and skunks and mice came to eat his veggies! Well, he wasn’t having it. He used the mouse to point at the varmint he wanted to hit with water so as to scare them away and then clicked! Off they went! While it was a little difficult for him to manage on his own (there were lots of pests!), he ended up with 68 vegetables to sell at the end of the first round.

Then? He got to drive a TRACTOR to deliver his vegetables. Could the child have been more excited? (Answer: unlikely.) This proved to be harder than we thought. We couldn’t avoid potholes very well. Or, he couldn’t alone. And we didn’t do all that great together either. I don’t know if it was our connection (slow) or our mouse (not great) or our manual dexterity (uh…) but we never got to the store. Eventually we could have made veggies in our kitchen. But we never got that far. Thankfully BigBrother is young enough that he was amused with bumping over potholes and played that for quite some time. In the end, FireDad was able to get there in time and with vegetables left in his tractor. He’s our hero.

To boot, the Love Your Veggies site has recipes, tips and other activities (like mazes and counting printables). It’s a great way to get talking about vegetables in your house. Right, BigBrother? Right.

FireDad and I have been talking about getting a dog. By talking about I mean he’s been jumping around like a kid on Christmas morning and I’ve been listing off all of the reasons that we cannot do it at this point in time. You know, the opposite of how our conversations on big purchases usually go. Good times. So when Parent Bloggers aked if I wanted to review Littlest Pet Shop, I said yes. Because it’s the closest thing we’re getting to a pet this year. I swear.

I gave the game a go by myself first to see if it was easy for adults to understand so they can help their kids. (Which, I know, it’s rare that kids need our help with anything video game but, still, I gave it a go.) I had no problems. It’s a pretty straight forward. Take care of pets. Feed and dress them. I didn’t have problem with menu choices (like the last game I tried). While the game itself was rather girly and I am not really girly, it didn’t annoy me.

Then I brought my three year old out to let him “help” me play. He didn’t press any buttons or do much of anything except talk, point, pretend to be a dog and generally have a blast. I had fun watching him laugh. Then his cousin, a Littlest Pet Shop aficionado, gave it a go. (She’s nine.) I couldn’t get her to leave my house. She was telling me all about the animals as she played the game and basically didn’t stop talking. (She’s a talker!)

When I asked my three year old what he thought of it, he said that it was “funny to watch the puppy.” When I asked my six year old cousin what she thought of the game, she said that it was fun to play with the Littlest Pet Shop animals on a screen and see what they’d do if they were “real.” Obviously, she knew that they weren’t real-real but it meant that it was fun to see them move. For the rest of the evening, my three year old son and six year old cousin played with the animals on the couch, talking up a storm. (He doesn’t stop talking either.)

I found this to be a good, wholesome game with multi-age and gender appeal. It’s one that I’ll be keeping in the house for various visitors. (And I might break it out myself as well!)

Go read more of what they’re saying about Littlest Pet Shop for Wii & DS!