I enjoy modern technology in moderation. Actually, I really enjoy modern technology for myself and the business, but I’m pretty picky about it when it comes to the children.
As a general rule, they’re not allowed to watch television. Movies are ok, just not tv shows. Although as with everything, I always reserve the right to make exceptions.
They’re not allowed to have video games at the house or play electronic games at the house.
They’re not allowed to have their own cell phones pre-driving.
They do have their own computers for their schoolwork, and they’re allowed limited use of the internet (mostly school related).
The oldest three just got their own emails and we’re working through the rules of having an email account.
But mostly, if they aren’t working hard or doing school work, then they’re reading or playing or using their imaginations or building something or running around.
But I do have to show you a piece of technology that belongs to the business, and is mostly used by me (there are certain perks that comes with creating the business). When I’m not working on it, we’ve come up with a great application for using it to entertain the children on long car trips.
Today we had to drive back from St. Louis (about 4.5 hours). For some of it, the children got to watch this:
Yep, that’s my iPad hanging from the visors of the Sprinter, streaming a Veggie Tales movie from NetFlix. The cord is connected to speakers so everyone can hear it.
On some of the “middle of nowhere” stretches of I-64, the movie would pause while it was streaming, but the children didn’t really mind. Overall it was a lot of fun.
We haven’t watched a lot of Veggie Tales movies since moving to Indiana. So it was really fun to see what Jim & I (and Brett & Cole) remembered. We actually remembered almost all of the songs and quite a few of the lines.
We’ve decided that when we go on vacation, if it rains, we’re going to have a Veggie Tales marathon, pop a ton of popcorn, and stream all the old Veggie Tales movies we love and all the new ones we haven’t seen. Jim got an adaptor to plug my iPad into a regular television, so we won’t have to huddle around the small iPad screen.
I wouldn’t say the children are actually praying for rain, but I don’t think they’re praying against it either. LOL
