Like All Parents, I gain great joy from torturing my step-son in the service of his scholastic endeavors. Recently I was given a new weapon in the battle, the power to turn off the router (internet access) with my smart phone. How does this make me feel?
It a beautiful thing really, he gets home from school, planning a day of doing nothing worthwhile, usually watching clips of other people playing minecraft on youtube. (A behavior that drives me up a wall) Only to find the internet refuses to provide its normal pipeline of mindless entertainment.
He texts me.
“Internet.”
I am at work so he can’t call unless it’s an emergency. We talked about this after he interrupted a meeting to ask me to bring home a burrito.
Now, when he wants the internet, I give him a list of chores, and he has to text me when they are completed to turn the internet back on. I don’t have to endure any complaining about it. He either has to do chores, or entertain himself without the internet. You can imagine what he picks each time.
This week, I kept a tally of every word he spelled wrong in text messages to me. One of the chores was to write each word he misspelled 10 times. The following ensued:
Now he is afraid to text me if he doesn’t have the internet on to use spell check.