One of the favorite Christmas gifts this year were the V-Tech Innotabs.  They love them. My only real complaint about them is they eat batteries. We went through 5 sets if 4 AA batteries for each of them in the first 2 weeks and then promptly bought wall plugs and new rechargeables.

It lets them play music, play games, read e-books, and do art (and who knows what else – I let Steve set them up). Part of me worries about the girls having too much screen time. The whole idea of these pads are almost intuitive for them. That seems weird to me. But I realize that screens of all sorts are part of their world in a way they never were or will be for my generation. So I try to not get too uptight about them playing with them. We are talking 30-60 minutes a day – usually not in 1 sitting so please don’t think I mean I allow them to vegetate in front of them. And we don’t let them play with our computers or phones.

Sabrina – I expected her to pick it up pretty quickly. But Tessa blew me away with her almost immediate understanding of how to work it. Oh, I do have 1 other complaint. I wish they made it harder to delete things. The girls deleted a lot of the items we loaded on there because they didn’t understand what “Are you sure you want to delete this?” meant when the computer asked. Not a big deal, just a pain to reload it all.

I can’t imagine what my childhood self would have thought of such a thing. I thought my Magic Merlin was the bomb and it can’t even be compared.