In September his leave was approved for the Christmas holiday.
By September 30th I had bought five round trip, first class (I wish) tickets to the island of Kauai.
On the night of said purchase in the middle of my conversation with the reservationist, Kevin suddenly got cold feet, or his wallet had a stroke, I'm not sure which.
After he recovered and/or revived his wallet, I happily bought the tickets.
Even one for Kevin.
Our next big dilemma was trying to find a way to occupy three children under the age of ten for 24 hours of airplane time.
So I did it. I bought iPods for my kids.
A few things brought me to finally do something that I thought I never would.
1) Recently my oldest has taken a very keen interest in music. I picked up a radio alarm clock as an add in to some other purchases I made from a guy off a local yard sale site. Eli was instantly drawn to it and asked if he could have it in his room.
I agreed.
It turns out, though, that English radio programs are much more liberal than the ones we are used to back in the states. Not only do they not edit the music but their talk shows tend to be a bit racy as well.
I wanted to keep a closer eye on what he was listening to.
2) It turns out some iPods can have a dual purpose. If you so desire you can download educational apps and force your children to learn while they think they are having fun. And most of those apps are free so it was a win win.
3) And finally I started thinking of the iPod as the Walkman of my children's generation. Except theirs is much cooler with the whole it plays a movie thing going for it.
So those were my justifications for getting them. That and the 24 hours that I knew would be filled by them.
And I have to say it worked out very well. We gave them as an early present at the London airport while we were waiting for the first of many planes and the look of shock and joy on their faces was priceless. (I'll post some pics as soon as I figure out where I/Kevin put them.) And the next 24 hours and the 24 hours on the way home went wonderfully. They were quiet, and not fussy. I didn't hear the dreaded phrase "I'm bored" once. We even received compliments on how well behaved they were.
All in all a huge success.
(One word of warning though if your child'd iPod has wifi capabilities I would strongly urge you to keep this feature turned off, sometimes getting on the web when you aren't supposed to can be too big of a temptation.)
