The iPad Thief

My thoughts and prayers are for everyone who was in the path of Sandy this week. I hope you're all doing okay. I'm also worried about my mom's oldest sister, Ruth from Montana, who's been in the hospital all week. She has some organ damage (I'm not sure if she had a stroke, heart attack, or what) but she now has some brain activity which was better than she was a few days ago.

Since all the big, bad stuff is happening everywhere else, it's pretty quiet in my little nook of the world and surprisingly warm weather for the end of October, though the cold is supposed to come in next week. No creepy-scary Halloween stories for me either. But my house did see A LOT more trick-or-treaters than it's ever seen before. That means, I gave candy to to nine kids--seven of them relatives, of course!

So I noticed during the set up for my book blog tour for The Color of Grace, that some people didn't receive some of the emails I sent them, or I didn't receive some of the emails THEY sent me. And I figured out the source to one of those problems the other day.

My daughter has taken over our iPad.  Yep, that's why. Whenever an incoming email comes in and pops up a message at the top of the screen, she gets excited and says, "I have an email!" Then she touches the message, which brings her into the email section. She must've watched me delete spam--a lot--because once she gets into the email screen, the first button she touches is the trash button.  So, yes, my kid has been deleting my emails as soon as they come in.

The iPad has become a glorified babysitter for whenever mom and dad want to get anything done, and she screams and rolls around on the floor throwing a fit whenever we "ground" her from it, plus it's good motivation device to get her to do something ("Oh, you want the iPad, huh? You have to eat your supper first. Ha!"), we can't keep it away from her forever.  Well, I guess, we could.  But she has us too well trained.  So our solution....

We've ordered another iPad. Yes, I'm humiliated to admit, the two-year-old has won this round.  All those times she's said, "It's my iPad," and we argued, "No, it's OUR iPad," well...we were just deluding ourselves. It was really her iPad.  So, mommy and daddy have ordered another for just them.

We'll see how this turns out.  And, yes, if you ever sent me an email to which I never replied, go ahead and send it again because it's possible the little heathen--I mean, angel--deleted it!

What kind of embarrassing things have your kids or pets trained YOU to do?? And please tell me this doesn't make me an awful parent...just really weak!