It was time.  We relented.  I needed my computer to write.  I wanted my iPad back too.  Both had been Minecrafting vehicles to my discontent.  They are mine.  As in the possessive form of the word. Bill and I stayed up late one night before we went to England so we could set the new iPod Touches up at home.  Side by side on the coach, we followed directions explicitly, making sure they were both set up identically.  We agreed to use the user ID our iTunes is set up with so the boys would have access to the music we have downloaded.

Christmas morning in England… Whoa!  We are the best parents ever!  Immediately, the boys tap into the Wi-Fi and join one another in the same Minecraft file.  They try sitting side by side on the settee.  They move to different rooms and chat with one another via the game.  Heck, I even get into the action by joining them via my iPad, which is back in my possession.  I go into their file.  Liam sees me and writes, “Hey, Mom?  Is that you?  Cool!  Follow me.  I’ll give you a tour.”  So I bumped him with my little blocky man – Will says that is how you say “hi” to one another.  I worked out the forward button and followed him around this strange cubed environment.  Then, I walked my little blocky man right into the pit where Liam’s pet pig was.  And I couldn’t get out.  Chatting back and forth didn’t help.  Finally, Liam came to my physical rescue, then politely uninvited me out of the file.  I think I was too much work.

Play soon ended and the real work began on Boxing Day, the day after Christmas, an English holiday.  Will wanted to change the passcode to access his iPod.  As long as Bill and I knew it, we didn’t have a problem with that.  Will told Liam he was changing his, and Liam thought that was a good idea too.  However, Bill and I didn’t know Liam was on the same course of passcode changing.

Liam came into Grandma’s from his aunt’s house next door and plopped down to go to work.  I could feel a stiff breeze and knew the door was open.  Liam, intent on the iPod, wasn’t responding to my multiple requests to close the door.  “LIAM, CLOSE THE DOOR!” finally got his attention.  After closing the door, Liam returned to his iPod but was locked out.  I didn’t realize that he had been changing his passcode in those seconds I was commanding him to shut the door.  Liam couldn’t remember what he had changed his passcode to.  We guessed the passcode five times and were then permanently locked out.  (Might I ask, iPeople, where is the “Forgot your password?” prompt that we Windows people rely on, frequently?)

The ensuing scene replicated one of those Christmas movies: horrible to the characters but hilarious to the viewers.  Bill worked eight hours straight to get the thing back on-line.  His hair stood on end; he tends to pull his hair with these kinds of challenges.  (He had me in a fit of laughter earlier this week: I had delegated to Bill the job of reading through the draft of our new will.  He had a stiff Mohawk by the end of that ordeal.)  Early evening, Bill pulled in Liam’s uncle and nephew and their computer.  A couple more hours of heads together, and there were cheers from the kitchen.  It had been recovered.

Home, on January 1st, another holiday.

The bag that had ripped on the way to England was duct-taped at Bill’s mum’s house before our bag drag began.  At the airport, the tape had failed, so Bill found a little store that would wrap the bag in plastic for us.  We had a good laugh about it once we got home and it was still securely wrapped.  Liam thought it looked like a mummy.  Bill, in the laundry room with the bag, took this picture of it…

…then sent it via text to his sister with the ha-ha caption: “Bag in Condom!”  Very funny, until you hear your 8-year-old say, “I just got 'Bag in Condom!'”  And then your 10-year-old chime in, “Hey, I did too!”  I track Bill down in the laundry room, his iPhone still smoking in-hand.  “Did you hear that?”  No.  “Do you want to go explain?  …No, never mind.  I will.”  As I deleted the message from the iPods, I rattled off something like it’s not a polite word to use with your friends at school, it means to wrap something tightly.  Surely, my vagueness has set up some definition searching on the Internet, hmmm?

An hour later, Liam finds me in the laundry room emptying bags.  “So Brad is going Sanibel Island, huh?”  I’m baffled: How did Liam know his friend was going there?  I had just spoken to Brad’s mom but not yet shared my conversation with Liam.  Lo and behold, Brad’s mom had just texted me via the iWaves about their trip.  (Note: I have a non-iPhone, so it didn’t actually go to my device.)

Yes, the immediacy of the need for the boys’ independence and our privacy became all too clear.  All of which is probably possible with the appropriate settings in one iAccount, but after throwing the ball back and forth between us on who could and would research the settings, Bill and I agreed the easiest thing to do would be to set up separate accounts for each of the boys.  And we needed one lead iGeek in the house.

Home on Snow Day Friday, January 4th, another holiday of sorts.

iWas consumed with iStress, but iEmerged victorious releasing Will into his own iWorld.  Next, iAm on to Liam’s – with no texting by Bill in the mean time.

iAm in iHell, but iHave found iHelp on the internet via Windows on my laptop.