This morning I read another article mischaracterizing the craze of the moment - Webkinz.
Haven’t heard of Webkinz? It’s a great website (www.webkinz.com) where you and your kids can turn purchased stuffed animals into virtual pets. The stuffed animals come with a code that unlocks a room and a virtual version of the animal. Then you go online to Webkinz world and can enjoy games, create rooms for the pets, earn Kinzcash, tend to a virtual garden, play trivia games, arcade games, old fashioned games (like checkers and go fish), compete in tournaments with other virtual pets, hunt for gems in the “Curio Shop,” send and receive gifts (and thank you cards) and so much more.
It is NOT comparable to Neopets which my kids found annoying. It’s also not like Beanie babies (which were about as bad as those ridiculous Mighty Beans) from a few years ago.
It’s a safe alternative to some fairly frightening online places your kids’ friends might be visiting or your kids might be tempted to visit.
Yes, I admit, I’m one of those adults who has been drawn into the Webkinz craze and will now confess to actually enjoying playing along with my kids.
Is it a chore (as described in so many recent articles)? Certainly not.
Do I have to feed and “care for” my kids pets? No!! The health, happiness and hunger levels will remain at 100 (full capacity) if you don’t go online for a month. It’s only while you’re playing that the meter starts to fall. So your kids could be away at camp or school all day or all week and never touch a computer, then come back and their pets would be exactly the same as they left them.
The only way a pet would turn green and have an ice pack on its head (with a low health meter) is if your child is playing online and completely ignoring the pet. My family has been playing for close to eight months now and I’ve never had a pet display these ailments. I tried to imagine how that might happen. Here’s all I came up with: Let’s say you play arcade games, participate in tournaments, perform your job in the employment office, hunt for gems in the Curio Shop, then spend a lot of time decorating your rooms and all the while never happen to notice your hunger meter going down, maybe, just maybe, the meter will get pretty low (I don’t think mine has ever gone lower than 50). But you’d have to play several days in a row, ignoring your pet each time you play (i.e., don’t bother tossing any food over to your pet) for it to get to the point of falling ill. And, by the way, you only play with one pet at time, so the neglect would only impact the one pet you’ve selected. Really, this emphasis on caretaking is simply unfounded. It’s not about the caretaking! I hardly pay any attention to the little guy while I enjoy the many activities the site offers. I do, however, slide over some food once in a while. It’s just not a big deal!
If nothing else, one might argue that it’s comparable to letting your gas tank get a bit low. If you drive all over town and don’t happen to glance at the gas meter, eventually you’ll find yourself in a predicament. But, after having one scare where my sister and I were driving across the country and almost ran out of gas in the middle of nowhere at nighttime, I generally make it habit to keep my gas tank above 1/2 full. I tend to treat my Webkinz health meter the same way. So, hey, you could argue that there’s a potential life lesson application for your kids (a stretch maybe?).
Anyway…
My bottom line here?
I wish folks would stop comparing Webkinz to Neopets, Tamagotchi and Beanie Babies and give Webkinz a try!!
I remember when I was in third grade walking to my gym class asking my teacher, Mr. Szymanski, the most perplexing question of my life, “Why are people mean?” He had no answer. I’ve been searching for it ever since.
Maybe, just maybe, I’m getting closer to understanding how to answer it.
Kids will do that for you - help you answer questions that you couldn’t answer before you were a mom. When questions arise in your children and they look at you with those love-filled, innocent eyes, you feel obligated to provide some kind of an answer.
So once again I ponder the questions I asked long ago. This time with much more experience, much more knowledge and maturity.
What have I come up with?
Well…with respect to today’s question…here’s what I said to the kids:
“People are often mean when bad things have happened to them. If people don’t address whatever hurt they feel right when it happens, it sits inside them and festers. It stays inside if they don’t deal with it and begins to slightly change,” I explained. “And then?” they asked. “Well, then they turn that hurt into anger and they lash out at other people–people who probably had nothing to do with what hurt them. But what we have to understand is that it has nothing to do with us. Okay, sometimes we might provoke it, but the intensity, the whole of their anger, really is not about us.”
“So what can we do?” they wondered.
“You can be compassionate and feel sad for them, maybe say a prayer if that’s your kind of thing, but just listen, hear them and then walk away. If nothing else, you can learn how you do not want to be. You can use it as an example of what not to do in your life. Don’t try to change them, don’t judge them. Just accept them as they are and move on. Focus on your own life and what you’re learning in your life. How you’re growing and changing and improving yourself,” I added.
“Every encounter provides an opportunity to learn. So learn something if you can and let it go.”
I continued, “We will probably never really know why certain people are mean. But it’s not for us to know or for us to understand. It’s just important that we tolerate them and feel compassion for them. And don’t let it change who we are. We can’t let it pull us into a negative place where we return the meanness with our own jabs of anger. Let’s keep our intentions pure.”
“Grandma always said, ‘If you can’t say something nice about someone, don’t say anything.’ Let’s live by that and focus on what’s good in our lives,” I urged.
“It might be tempting to wish that all difficult people would just disappear down some dark bottomless pit, but that’s no solution. There will always be difficult people in our lives. Always. We can’t run away from them. We can’t change them,” I continued. “But when we encounter them, we can choose to go deeper into our selves and find the soft spot within ourselves. Not to make ourselves more vulnerable, rather to remember who we are and feel the compassion in our hearts. Let their rage pass by us like a hot wind. Observe it as it flies past, but just let it fly. It will pass. Just give it time.”
Then I reminded them, “Every night we say, ‘I forgive myself for any mistakes I made today, I correct them, learn from them and then I let them go.’ The letting go part is especially important. When we choose to hang onto anger or turn it into resentment or bitterness, we start walking down the darker path. We, too, then have unresolved feelings festering inside us. So let go. Trust that it’s not up to us to deal with all the injustices in the world. But it is up to you to be the best YOU you can be. For today, choose to not be a difficult person.”
You know, being a mom actually helps you figure out life.
I’m surprised to hear some moms criticizing the iPhone, saying that it doesn’t have enough features.
Are you kidding me??
It is a phone, after all, and some people want it to do everything that every other device can do. Talk about demanding.
It might not have video capability, but please! You can take fairly decent photos with it. You can also, by the way, use the photos you take as the photo identification in your contacts - cool! Okay, many phones do that now, but with the iPhone’s large screen, I can actually see these photos, unlike my old tiny little cell phone.
Another comment I heard is that someone wanted to be able to read books in it (i.e., to have it function as an e-reader, too!). Come on now. I think that’s absolutely unreasonable. The audiobooks are sufficient for me.
Let’s talk more about what it can do!
It has a beautiful-to-look-at calendar that is just as good as (if not better than) my Palm. I can include detailed notes, birthdays, anniversaries, and even a to-do list at the top of my hour-by-hour day page. I can flip through it with a gentle flick of my finger and it’s visually more appealing than my gray screen Palm. It syncs with iCal on a Mac, so the whole family can use the always up-to-date calendar.
I can also watch You Tube videos (by the way, speaking of YouTube, if you’re considering an iPhone, you really need to check out David Pogue’s/NYT video).
David Pogue’s “I Want an iPhone” Movie
Well more accurately, my kids can watch You Tube videos while we’re waiting in line or on a long car trip or whatever. Or they could watch one of my many downloaded movies, tv programs (from Sponge Bob to The Office), music videos and more.
Speaking of car trips, I can also check weather for the week in a variety of cities of choice. Once again, I can do that neat finger-flick action to look at the attractive, colorful pages.
Curious about stock activity? Check. It’s got that capability.
Texting? Sure. In the most stylish way I’ve seen.
Music via iTunes (just like any iPod)? Absolutely. Steve Jobs has said it’s the best iPod ever made (to date). I especially love cover flow (the ability to flip through the album covers with a gentle flick of a finger).
Short example of cover flow in action
Internet searches? YES! (admittedly, it has no Flash player so that means you can’t play Webkinz, but still…). Check today’s headlines or find out the online price of a book while you’re standing in a bookstore which wants to charge you full price. Apple may upgrade sometime in the future to allow Flash to function, so I’ll keep my hopes up. Oh, and the cost of surfing? Included in your monthly AT&T bill (which really is not very big (in terms of pages), though some folks have stated otherwise…).
I also love the e-mail feature. You can check messages from several accounts (e.g., AOL, Gmail, Yahoo). And the iPhone notifies you (with an ear-pleasing, gentle buzz) when you receive another message.
Okay, now on to the phone features. Right, it is a phone after all! Your list of contacts can include the standard home phone, work phone, mobile phone, various e-mail addresses, birthday, spouses’ names, kids’ names, and more. But here’s the feature I love. If you touch the address listing for one of your contacts it takes you immediately to a map of the location! Then, if you need to drive there, it can provide directions (there and back!) and show you the current traffic on major arteries.
Does your old phone do that?
Oh, and if you’re on vacation and you want to find the nearest Starbucks? Type in “Starbucks” and the map will provide locations, indicated on the map with tiny little red-ball-tipped pins, along with the phone number and address right in your contacts. Just touch the phone number and it will call the location you selected. Think about how that could work to call ahead to get take out on your way home.
If you like maps as much as I do, you may want to go to an Apple store to see its map in action.
Assignable ringtones are more fun than other phones, too, including a barking dog and an old fashioned phone ringer.
UPDATE - Now you can hand pick measures from selected iTunes songs and design your own ringtone! I did that with John Mayer and I love it!
The Apple folks are excited about the visual voicemail feature where you’re given a list of all your voicemails and can scroll through to select only the voicemails you want to listen to at that moment. Very, very handy — especially if your child’s school called with an urgent message, or if you have six messages from someone you don’t need to talk to (or who leaves long messages) and one from someone you need to speak with urgently. You don’t have to listen to six other voicemails to get to that one urgent message. Just touch it and it plays.
Everything loads, syncs and charges through iTunes in your computer, so you just put the iPhone into the dock (included) and all the information is transferred (back and forth). That feature also means that if you (heaven forbid) ever lost your device, you could get a new phone and upload everything into it and continue right where you left off. So you have no worries about losing all your information forever (a concern which I’ve heard some people express).
Overall, IMHO the iPhone is well worth the investment. It lives up to the hype and makes my life easier and a whole lot more fun!!
UPDATE (1/16/08): On Tuesday, January 15, 2008, at the Macworld Expo 2008, Apple announced a new update to the iPhone. Now you can move your icons around on the home screen, create a few different home pages and create icons. For example, if you have a favorite blog (ahem) you can just call it up on Safari, then touch the plus sign at the bottom of the screen and choose “Add to Home Screen.” It produces a new icon for that particular website and instantly displays it on your home page screen. Fantastic! Now I can quickly go to my favorite blogs with one touch of a finger. Other options include mailing a link to the page and adding the page as a bookmark.
You’ll find over 600 Web apps (including some games like Mahjong) that you can add to any of your (up to) nine home pages.
Apple also improved upon the map features. View the video by clicking here.
All of these updates are free for iPhone owners. They just sync their iPhones and click on “check for update.”
I still feel passionately positive about my iPhone and think it’s the best phone out there for moms!
Yes, I have to chime in and say that this device is absolutely, positively ideal for stay at home moms (and everyone else, for that matter!)! I used to have a Palm Pilot, mobile phone, and a big clunky paperback map book in my car. Now, with one device, I have all of those inside one well designed stylish tool of beauty — the iPhone. In addition to all of those features (phone, calendar, map), I’m treated to an iPod (best one ever made), all of my email, Internet access at my fingertips and so much more…
I recently saw a fun video that captures the passion some people have about the iphone.
It’s David Pogue’s (the New York Times technology reviewer’s) YouTube video. I just can’t get enough of it. So fun…
The bottom line?
If you can swing it…
GET an iPhone!
I hereby finally acknowledge and accept that all things Mac/Apple are brilliant, well designed, easy to use, gorgeous to look at and super efficient. I give full credit to my sisters who have been trying (for decades!) to make me see the light. Thanks!! You were right all along!!
