Whoopee!

Having two kids is fine until the little one gets old enough to steal the big one's toys.

Let me say that the Toy Rage gets on my neves a little bit. He's happy to play with toys he hasn't seen since he was a baby, she wants to take them off him because she thinks they're hers, he wants to take them back to teach her not to snatch, etc.

So it's great when Sonny Ma-Jiminy became old enough to play some big boy games that babies wouldn't be interested in. The computer is good for this, but it does provide too many of the "Mummy can you come and help me use the mouse and keyboard"-type-games, or the "I clicked outside the window and the game went away"-type-games. The computer held promise until it became obvious that Sonny required constant one-on-one assistance. And then the computer was stolen.

But with Mr de Elba's iPhone came a trillion little games that Sonny can play without much help.

iPhones have a touch screen, so it's easy for Smoochy to play the games like the one where little bubbles fly across the screen and she pops them by tapping them with her finger.

They also have an accelerometer inside, so they detect movement. This means that Sonny can hold the phone sideways (landscape) and "steer" it like a car's steering wheel when he's playing car games.

Sonny's only problem is that sometimes his little fingers hit buttons they shouldn't, like when he called Mr De E's boss yesterday (the thing still is an actual phone. We keep forgetting that.)

And there are the times when he gets out of his game and opens a completely new one. "I can't get the chickens to move, Dad," he said one day. Mr de Elba replied, "I thought you were playing cars. Did you open a different game?"

"Yeah. A chicken game," Sonny said.

"Lemme see. Oh. That's a ... err, what ARE those creatures?"

I can't even remember what they were, to make this post more interesting. Alpacas or some other animal never before seen in a computer game. Something very unlike chickens, anyway.

Today he was playing one of his usual games, perhaps a car game, and Mr de Elba left him to it for a while. Sonny emerged after a few minutes, trying to form a question about what he was seeing on the screen. I noticed that the cars were making odd sorts of engine noises, spluttering loudly in short bursts when Sonny's thumbs hit the screen.

What was on the screen? What "game" was he playing? This:



Yep. A Whoopee Cushion game. Touch the screen and ... Whoopee!


(I realise that continuing to post Life As We Know It may result in the loss of some of my favourite and most classy readers, and but for the lack of other material, I'd stop.)