Thursday, January 21, 2010

But I still love technology...

Lately, Nate and I have discovered the joy of letting Asher have time on the computer, XBox, and my iPod. He spends most of his time writing his name on my iPod, playing pbskids.org on the computer, and playing a racing car game on the XBox.

I try to monitor him while he does this. I can see what he's doing on my computer from the kitchen, and I figured my iPod was pretty safe and that he wasn't really all that interested in straying from the XBox racing car game and Netflix kids uploads on the XBox.

I mean, the kid can't read or write...how much trouble can he get into?

Well, last week, we learned that Asher can buy apps for my iPod. He bought 2 at $5 each.

Then, tonight, Nate walked in to watch Asher playing his car game, and Nate was impressed that Asher had earned enough points to get the fancy hover car he was driving. That's when we figured out that Asher learned how to get into the game's store and buy himself new cars with Nate's precious XBox points.

When he ran out of XBox points, he figured out how to get off of the game and into Nate's XBox account to buy more XBox points with our credit card. Um, I can't remember if he figured that out.

All I know is that our iTunes and our XBox accounts are now unsynced from our credit card, which is probably a good thing, but kind of a pain because apparently, even free downloads (podcasts and the like) from both want to be connected to a credit card.

Our fault for not being more observant parents, and then, my mind races--if he can do this at 4, what sorts of trouble will he get into when he's 8 or 12 or 16? Or when he, gulp, learns to read?

I need to go take some Tums...

2 comments:

Rachel said...

I guess its a good thing that we're behind the technology curve. Not because we want to be, but...needless to say we'd be in deep do do with Noelle. She too enjoys a little PBSkids and somehow has made it to the charging site and had a month long trial with it. Good thing there were no credit cards attached.

Cirroc said...

You should create a separate XBox Live account for Asher and keep the credit card-synced account separate (and password protected). That way, everybody's happy.