A+ eight years old and she won't always want to play with me, so while I can, we play together. Lately, she's been interested in Minecraft parkour maps.

I remember when parkour was too frustrating for us to do. In the beginning, I felt my stomach flip every time I fell. I kept having to tell myself that I wasn't the one actually falling. When we first played through Path of the Jedi, we spent a long, long time on the stage with the parkour challenge until we found out that we could bounce on the leaves to reset the timers. That was too hard for her before, so I ended up moving her character through that stage.

Now, she enjoys the challenge. She zips ahead through the different levels. Whenever she falls, she just gets back up and does it again. "It's frustration practice," she tells me cheerfully, my words echoing from her mouth. I'm getting slightly better at it too. My stomach no longer flip-flops, and I can sometimes get those double-slime jumps on the first try. It still takes me multiple tries to get through a puzzle that she does in one go, though. Still, I have the most patient tour guide and teacher. She often stays a step or two ahead of me so that she can point out where to go. Sometimes I'm the one who spots the thing we need to do to progress. If there's a particularly tricky jump that I'm having a hard time with and she's already far ahead, she lets her character AFK while she stands beside me and cheers me on. I still tend to yelp when I fall down, which she finds amusing.

We started playing with Parkour Spiral 2, and we've been slowly working our way through other ones released by Hielke Maps. I liked the multiple paths in Parkour Town, the small, self-contained puzzles of Parkour Paradise, and the colours of Parkour Egg. We might not play Parkour Volcano though. We're not yet good at timed parkour, and we ended up cheating our way past the lava-is-rising stage in Parkour Pyramid. Anyway, once we get through those puzzles, there are tons of other maps.

I like how she works hard on figuring out puzzles and is so satisfied when she makes a hard jump. I'm glad I can semi-sort-of keep up with her, or at least trail along behind her at a pace that isn't too frustrating for her. It's fun figuring out tougher levels together.

I'm glad that she talks about the cycle of trying and failing and trying and learning, and how feelings play into it: building that frustration tolerance, trying hard things, feeling the satisfaction of accomplishment. She still gets frustrated in other contexts, but I'm confident it'll transfer. I'm learning, too.