Yours Has More Power

Just recently Mom and I updated our phones.  Mom has had an iPhone for close to 2 years and I just picked up my first one.  When it comes to kids owning an iPhone is probably the best tool in the box to keep your kids entertained.  You can upload movies to it, watch cartoons on YouTube, and play video games.  When Mom first had her phone and Alyce was 2ish Alyce would watch Roadrunner cartoons while we ate dinner in peace.  From cartoons she graduated to Disney movies and now she's moved onto apps.  Some apps are simple and silly and others require a little bit on intelligence.

When Alyce was younger her favorite application was Peekaboo Barn.  This app would show a red barn that was shaking.  When you pressed on the doors they would open up, show an animal, the animal would make a noise, and a kid would say the name for the animal.  You could set up the application so that when it reached the end of the animals it would start over with the first.  Brilliant!

The second application that Alyce took a liking too was Shape Builder.  Shape Builder gives you an picture and breaks it up into individual shapes.  Your job is to drag those shapes into their appropriate positions.  A simple puzzle game where you match shapes rather than the picture.  Alyce still gets some use out of this one but her interest has been waning.  I'm thinking because she's seen all the shapes and is getting bored.

Now that Mom and I have new iPhones Mom's old iPhone has been re purposed as the kids gaming machine.  This works well for everyone because Alyce can't break our phones and we can keep most of the kids applications from cluttering up ours.

Last weekend we were at Gram's and Papa's and Alyce was playing a game on her new old phone.  She was sitting in my lap and I was helping her play the game.  After 5 minutes or the screen goes black as the battery has run down on Alyce's device.  I tell Alyce that we can't play the game anymore because the batteries have died.  Her response to me was "yours has more power" and then looked at me expectantly.  Everyone burst into to laughter.  As Alyce is getting older it is becoming obvious that we can't pull the wool over her eyes like we used to.  I hear once your kids are able to read and spell you lose the last trick in the bag to keep information from them.