May the Force be with us

Here's the deal. Jake has somehow become a video game junkie. At the age of 20 months. I am a horrible mama. How could this have happened you may ask? Well, let me tell you. He watches his daddy play Star Wars on the X-Box a friend of his let him borrow. And somehow he figured out a lot of the controls.

I'm not saying that Big Daddy taught him how to play. I'm just saying that Jake learned it from watching him. Just like he has learned where we keep all of our snack items by watching me.

So anyhow, a couple days ago, Jake brought me one of the X-Box controllers and said as clear as a bell "I want to play!" This is a miracle in and of itself since he is not yet speaking in sentences. I always thought his first sentence might have something to do with loving mommy so imagine my joy when it actually had something to do with playing video games. Oh, we've taught him well.

So I said "you want to play?" And he said "yeah!". Then he walked over to the X-Box and turned it on, went to the TV and switched it to the AV channel and then changed the surround sound to the auxiliary button. I kid you not. That is three different devices with multiple buttons and he knows exactly which ones to push and how many times to push them. Then when the Star Wars theme music comes on he just starts squealing and saying "yeah, yeah, yeah!" He hasn't quite figured out how to work all of the buttons on the actual game controller. So far, he's content to just make the storm trooper jump up and down while he(Jake) says "Wheee!" Sometimes he launches an occasional grenade but I don't think he really knows what he's doing when that happens.

I told Mike that the X-Box needs to go back to its original home so we can maintain the sweetness and innocence of our child for at least another year. That's when he informed me that his friend had actually GIVEN him the thing as payment for working on his car. Great. Remind me to send the child psychologist payments to his friend when Jake needs help determining reality from a video game in kindergarten.

Until then, I'll be using my own Jedi mind tricks to convince Jake he really doesn't want to play Star Wars anymore.