Pushing water uphill

It was Boy #2's birthday recently (he was eleven.  ELEVEN.  How did that happen?)  He loves the fact that it's so early in the year as he sees it as an opportunity to mop up the items on his Christmas list that didn't turn up under the tree.

One of those was a laptop (we try to keep Christmas presents relatively modest, so there was no way this was going to make the cut), and another a game he's long been lusting after, to play on it.  Lucky boy, he scored both for his birthday.

However...

Neither OH or I are computer wizards.  I would, in fact, go so far as to call us complete dimwits in this respect.  OH has been carting around 2 laptops for a month now; his old, barely functioning one, and a brand spanking new shiny-shiny that he has not got around to setting up yet.  I'm no better;  I've been having problems with my own 4 year old model recently, and have my suspicions that this is due in large part to the fact that I probably never set it up properly in the first place.  Not that I would admit that to my beloved, obviously.  Not when there is the chance of a new laptop for me as a result (my own birthday is not too far away, so... ).

Despite our technical shortcomings Boy #2 is now - understandably - desperate to get his new laptop operational and to get said game installed, so OH 'took control' of the job at the weekend.  Much frustration ensued, and when he left the house on Tuesday he hadn't managed to finish the job; he would, he informed us, install the game on his return at the weekend.

The issue, however, is that Boy #2 needs motivation at the moment.  (OK; bribes, essentially).  He's coming to the end of a long road with school tests etc, so it seemed to me that completing the installation earlier than that would be a good reward for all his hard work.

It should be easy, right?

In the last 2 days I have spent over 3 hours trying to get the bloody game set up, and have got precisely nowhere.  This afternoon I thought I might have made a breakthrough when it looked as if our anti-virus software might be the roadblock, but to circumvent that I needed the serial number of our account.

Which led to the following conversation...

Me:  'So, I can't set up that game on Boy#2's laptop.  I think the anti-virus software is blocking it - can you send me the serial number?'

OH:  'What anti-virus software?'

Me:  'The one you set up on his new laptop.'  silence.  'You did set it up, didn't you?'

OH:  'Well - no.  I didn't set anything up.  Because I couldn't even get Windows to work - that was what I was muttering about on Monday evening.  God knows what the problem was but other than registering Boy #2's name on the laptop, nothing's been done.  Were you not listening to me?'

Me (carefully ignoring the last question - of course I was listening to him...): 'Which is probably why I can't get this game set up.'

OH: 'Correct.'

Me:  'So I've been wasting my time.  All 3+ hours of it.'

OH. 'Uh-huh...'

Ghosts in the 'machine'.

This morning, in my parent's dining room, I was watching the happenings on twitter (an addictive personality? Me?), and Boy #1 was indulging in a spot of Nintendo-love. Every now and again he would mutter something obscure like 'pink road', 'blue road' or 'I've got protection' (What?).

Now, I have to say that I have been eating slightly richer food here than I would normally do. My mother is a fantastic cook, and not only would it be foolish in the extreme to turn down her culinary offerings, it's more than my life as a beloved daughter is worth. So (have you guessed where I'm going with this?) my stomach is a little more 'volatile' than it would normally be. A little 'noisier'. A little - oh, alright. I'm more explosive than usual.

I've been trying not to share this too much with my children, but what the hell, a fart's a fart at the end of the day and I'm not going to leave the room for one; it's not like they do that for me, after all...

So, there we were, Nintendo and laptop keys singing along in happy unison when suddenly there was an unidentified (to Boy #1, at any rate) noise. A sort of a squeal, if I could call it that. Now, I knew where it came from. But Boy #1 - safely on the other side of the room - didn't.

He looked at me in surprise. "What was that?" "What was what?" (I know - I'm a charlatan). "That - that noise?" "I don't know..."

"Oh. Right. Do you think maybe it was... a ghost?"

Dear Internet, forgive me. My answer? "Gosh. Well, of course there are no such things really, but yes, I suppose it could have been..."

Will I burn in hell, do you think?

I never Nintendo'd for this to happen...

I've never been much into computer games. The whole gaming revolution pretty much passed me by; as a child I much preferred to get stuck into a good book, as a teenager much the same, (discounting my text books, obviously, which I shunned completely), and as an adult, well, face-to-face interaction always seemed preferable to sitting hunched over a keyboard. (Although blogging seems somehow to have escaped that embargo.)

Anyway, when I had children, I was determined that I wasn't going to raise two pale-faced sons who never saw the sun, and that instead they would be Proper Boys, running around outside, digging up worms, sometimes (retch) eating them, climbing trees, playing football, and generally living a 1950's dream that does not - in reality - exist.

So no computer games for us, golly gosh no.

Despite all evidence that my master plan had failed and that Husband and I were in fact raising city boys ('Yuck! My hands are dirty, mama!'), this mindset continued until recently. I ignored the fact that rather than build dens and get messy, both my sons are addicted to television (or were, before we arrived here and didn't have one which, thanks to one person in particular - you know who you are - has been a lot less traumatic than I had expected), overall we stuck to our guns and kept computer games out of the house at least.

Then, shortly before we left for Russia, a friend took me to one side and said; "I know that you don't want the Boys to become totally immersed in computer games but really, it's important that they have some exposure to them, otherwise they are going to be odd ones out. It is possible to do these things in moderation, you just need to keep any eye on it."

Interesting take, and food for thought, and once we arrived here it became apparent that this friend was right. We found ourselves surrounded by balanced, normal families, who dipped in and out of the game culture as they felt like it, and really, given the fact that 5 months of the year here are not conducive to out-door pursuits, I began to think that perhaps something to take the heat off me during long days at home when it was minus 25degC outside might not be a bad idea. There are only so many 1950's -style airfix planes and ships in bottles one can build, after all... especially on your own whilst your kids are playing at being Ben 10 or Transformers.

So, when Boy #1 did so well with his skiing recently, braving all weathers, being a generally all-round good sport, and most amazingly just getting on with it without moaning and complaining (which any mother of a 6 year old boy will know is a miracle in itself), Husband and I caved. He had been mentioning a Nintendo DS as a potential birthday present for some time - not in a nagging way, just in a 'wow, wouldn't it be amazing if...' way (he's nothing if not canny, my son) -and we decided that with a summer of flights and car journeys not long off, it was time to reward him.

And so the Potski Familiski has finally entered the 21st century in terms of technology. We didn't give him everything he wanted, you understand; Boy #1 was hoping for a Ben 10 game but I looked into it and didn't like the level of casual violence, so he got a Mario Kart game instead. And so far so good; he's loving it and will even - gasp! - share with his brother. He even asks me to play from time to time (although I suspect this is just for the humour value when I lose horribly). But this new toy has brought about a new question for me.

How much time playing is too much? Or, on the flip side, how much is enough? At the moment we've set a limit of 20 minutes in the morning and the same in the afternoon for the Boys to play with it. That seems to me to be enough to give them the chance to play a couple of games without eating into 'real-life' time, but then I started to wonder if it IS too much. Or, on the other hand, are we being too proscriptive, and should we just let him play with it as much as he dam' well pleases?

I thought technology was supposed to answer problems, not create them...