A week ago, he was particularly on it. Usually, I just ask him about certain games or characters or whatnot and we have a fun mental window shopping session. Annie, too, wants her grubby paws on some technology and fast. "A cell phone, a digital camera, a didj, a Nintento DSP," she lists.
"There is no such thing as a Nintendo DSP," retorts Graham.
"There should be," she replies.
(Sony engineers take note, please.)
That particular day was a day of son-related expenses. His Halloween costume arrived, I took him to math tutoring, I sent a check for his school lunch account, and we went to the pharmacy for (seriously) 1000 new syringes and a grab bag of humolog. By the time the day was down we had reached the low three digits. Yeah, I'm talking about hundreds o'bucks.
He was grumbling about something ... "sonicmariogimmehelpbored" and so on.
"You know, bud, I just spent like $300 on you today," I said, hoping for a little appreciation.
"Three hundred dollars, Mom?" he asked, and not with the grateful tone I was expecting. "For that, you coulda bought me a Wii!"
{stunned silence in the driver's seat}
"I could have bought you a Wii??? But Graham ..."
"Yeah, I know," he added halfheartedly, without waiting for me to finish. "I'll die without it and I guess that's more important than a video game." His words sounded hollow.
As long as we're clear on our priorities:
1) sustain life
and then, and only then, 2) amuse ourselves to death
p.s. yes, I'm the kind of holdout mother who tries to recount tales of playing Oregon Trail - the text version - to her kids with lines such as this, "We typed the words 'Load wheat' and we liked it!"
3 comments:
Erin! That Oregon trail graphic at the end is PRICELESS. Oh my--this post has NYT editorial written all over it.
GUFFAW.
(Also, this motivates me to get down all my video game thoughts in a concise manner. I have strong feelings on the subject.)
Oregon trail lives on! What about the FUN we would have with MacPaint on the old 4 inch screen on mom and dad's original computer. Click and drag to color a blank screen - and we LOVED it.
Erin - I have been there WITH you reminding Graham about Laura Ingalls' "The LONG Winter" - eating two meals of plain wheat a day, and how LUCKY Almanzo was to have the wheat stored in his faux wall - and he had buckwheat pancakes for every meal. I'm not entirely sure that THAT message got through - how lovely an orange would have been to stave off scurvy and whatnot.
Really truly, we still managed to connect with friends, do fun things, and be excited about life without cell phones, internet, computer games (we never had Atari or Nintendo), or even movies - hey, we had fun making villages out of acorns. Go figure!
I actually remember that. Wow, had you not said anything I probably would have never remembered playing that game when we had our assigned time to play games on the computer in elementary. Oh the good times.
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