I’m a sucker for infomercials. They have an alarmingly high success rate of leaving me
feeling like my life would be 110% improved by the acquirement of their
item. I believe this stems from
bad habits in my teenage years. My
older brother Scott and I would stay up late (very late) in the summer, and it
turns out if you insist on watching TV at three in the morning the only thing
that’s going to be on is infomercials.
Watching them repeat over and over while half awake seems to have
induced a kind of brainwashing or hypnotic effect in me. Why we did this – no idea. It seemed like fun at the time? *shrug*
Truth be told, I kind of love them. Everyone’s so positive and happy, and
all the “people” using the inferior products are so dumb, yet fun to watch. I dunno. Don’t judge me.
Luckily for me (and my husband’s wallet) this driving need
to buy things from the TV is considerably hindered by the equal if not greater
strength of my laziness. Stand up
and walk across the room to get my wallet and phone? Not gonna happen.
Plus I have a natural distrust of giving my credit card information over
the phone. People sit in vans with
special listening devices, just waiting for unsuspecting people on cell phones
to give up all their personal information including, but not limited to, their
mother’s maiden name while making Shamwow purchases. Then they spend all your money and charge RV’s and furniture
and vacations to you and your credit score will be in ruins for forever! It’s true. You saw it on the news.
Anyways, the point I was really trying to get to today was
that after all the years of watching infomercials I finally bought something
from the TV: ABC Mouse. It’s a
computer program or App you can download with tons of games designed to help
your 2-6 year old learn to read and count and stuff. It’s a pretty nifty little program and my kids were enamored
with it from the word go.
They’ve only just started playing with it recently, so I
can’t give any reviews on whether or not it does what it’s supposed to, but I
can say I’ve already seen one major area of improvement: their understanding of
money.
For each game they play they earn a number of tickets. These tickets can be used in a store
area where they can buy anything from pets to clothes to furniture to decorate
their little fake bedrooms. They
love this! Evee picked out a fancy
bed she wanted – and she wanted it something fierce. She tapped the ‘Buy Now’ button and to her confusion it told
her she didn’t have enough tickets.
She pursed her lips, thought about it, and then tried to hand the ipad a
handful of pretend money.
It was not accepted.
To get her bed she had to ‘work’ for it and earn it, which
she did after a lot of me explaining about what ‘earning it’ means. I’ve gotta admit it was fun to watch
her puzzle her way through her problem and see how proud she was once she
accomplished her goal. It makes me
really look forward to the future when she’ll be accomplishing things of much
greater merit.
The only real problem with this is now I've seen that what they promise on the TV is absolutely totally true and so I must buy all the things! Everything I see will bring me the greatest of joy happiness!
Will my lazy-bum nature be enough to counteract this newly heightened need to purchase? Only time will tell...
