“Where is our mom and what have you done with her?”

Back track to Chicago… Much to the children’s glee, we visited the Apple Computer store on Michigan Avenue.  It is bustling with smiley faced people, both employees and shoppers, everybody in that darn place is happy! We spent over an hour playing with the IPOD TOUCH and in the end, I bought one.  The children were stunned.  “Where is our mom and what have you done with her?” Jacob asked with a sheepish smile on his face.  There I was his crazy “stop watching TV and playing video games mom” entering the realm of handheld electronics, an IPOD is kind of a grown-up version of a DS…and as I have found, I could spend hours playing with it.   

So how does this fit into our resolution? 

Well, I actually share it with them.  We have gone online together and chosen songs and cartoons to download.  We talk about the photos we put on there and decide which photo gets to be our wallpaper (Noah actually chose a photo with all of us in it!) and then we get to negotiate using it (ha,ha!)

Maybe I did go overboard and sometime in the future after I have downloaded the 17,000 songs that fit onto my IPOD (thereby spending around $17,000 and many hours of my precious time downloading information) I will find that I am pasty white and puffy and have nothing to talk about but my IPOD TOUCH but somehow I doubt it.  Actually it has been fun and of course, as the grown-up I am just using it as another opportunity to teach them balance and responsibility and maybe this will just be a test for all of us.