My kingdom for some sanity.

Not that my kingdom is worth much and the bank still owns half of it, plus there’s the fact that I don’t know anyone powerful enough to restore my sanity. Seriously though, my children are keeping me on my toes.

We’ve had drama in recent months with middle MM and police curfews as I’ve mentioned in previous posts and then the fun with oldest MM finding a regular paying job accompanied by the trouble with DIL and the birth of my new grandson. So it only stands to reason that youngest MM has jumped on the ‘challenge your parents’ bandwagon and demanded some attention as well.

His problem - a serious addiction! He is addicted to X-Box Live. This means he can play X-Box on line with a headset and compete against his friends who are sitting in their own homes. The last few months the amount of usage has been getting progressively worse. We’ve been monitoring the usage and allowing him to set some boundaries – because he’s normally very mature and reliable. Yesterday, the first day of a two week school holiday break and he had a marathon session that had hubby seeing red last night.

Eight hours in one day is neither normal nor healthy. Hubby was ready to pull internet connection and / or take to the machine with a hammer. Obviously this resulted in momentary massive panic from me at the mention of cutting internet connection. Okay so maybe I also have a slight addiction to blogging, but I certainly don’t spend 8 hours a day doing it.

Hubby on a roll meant of course that my computer usage at night came into question as well. Despite my explaining that writing was a total different kettle of fish to shooting bad guys and yelling at your mates through a headset, it still remained that I was partly to blame for son getting away with ridiculous amounts of X-Boxing time and that I was setting a bad example.

The result, youngest MM is banned from the machine for several days and I’m writing this post at work in my lunch break. Take away my blogging and I might just slip into total insanity. Honestly though, we’ve never experienced this problem before with the other two MM’s and it still remains that youngest MM’s friends’ parents are allowing their children to do the same thing.

What ever happened to school holidays being about riding bikes, kicking balls around and generally being kids and having fun? Youngest MM moans then that there’s nothing else to do during the holidays. Which means it’s going to be a very long two weeks. Thankfully hubby is home the remainder of the week with him and can put up with the sullen ‘woe is me’ mood of a teenager denied his fun.

What is the world coming to when gaming machines and computers are ruining our children? I’m quite lost as to how to deal with this other than a) taking a hammer to the machine b) cutting internet – neither of which are really options in my book or c) being nasty ‘abnormal’ parents and massively limiting access.

Wish me luck, Fi

A little kingdom I possess, where thoughts and feelings dwell; And very hard the task I find of governing it well. ~ Louisa May Alcott