Andventures in Parenting

So, today was our first official session of WoW together, me and The Boy. We did two quests together before it was time to stop and do some chores. I am happy to report that Cozom and Roywinkle performed admirably, and neither died even once! This is saying something, as the last time I played with The Boy I distinctly remember mountains of mobs being pulled down on us; he has vastly improved in his game play.

It’s been a whole father/son computing weekend, though. Some months ago The Boy asked me about having his own Facebook page. At the time I didn’t see anything wrong with it, so we tried to sign him up. Turns out they have a minimum age and so that put the breaks on, then and there. I told him then that, if he was really serious about it, we could get him his own domain and set up a Wordpress blog. He said he’d give it more thought, which I encouraged, and not much was said about it again until this weekend.

Yesterday morning he decided on a domain name, and if you follow the link up there, in the first paragraph, you’ll see what he picked. At first we just registered the domain and installed Wordpress; I figured it’d be a few days more of showing him how to post things, and how the interface works, before he’d be making actual posts. He’s eight. I often underestimate him.

After the morning of setting things up, he and I drove into the neighboring town to see Horton Hears a Who (which was pretty damned funny, by the way). On the drive we discussed his new domain and the blog. The conversation went something like this:

“… so, once you learn how to log in to your …”
“I know how to log in! I was just there this morning.”
“No, son. That’s just navigating to the page. You need to log in in order to post.”
“Oh. How do I do that?”
“Well, you click LOGIN, and type in your username and password.”
“What are they?”
“Well, your user name is [redacted] and your password is [redacted].”
“And then what?”
“I’ll show you when we get home.”
“Just tell me.”
“Well, basically, you click WRITE and then type in a title and the body of your post and click PUBLISH.”

That was the whole of it. He nodded and turned his attention back to his DS. We had lunch and saw the movie and went home, and there really wasn’t much more conversation about it again until this morning. That conversation included his mother, and went something like this (and yes, I do have a particular fondness for the word AND):

Mommy chides the boy, “So! Have you written a bunch of posts yet?”
Daddy cuts in, “Nah, I haven’t shown …”
The boy pipes up, “Yup! Two!”
Knowing his son is sometimes prone to exaggeration, especially when goaded by chiding parents, daddy says, “No you haven’t! You don’t even know how to do it yet!”
The boy replies, offended, “I do so! You told me in the car!”
Mommy arches a brow at daddy, who rises and checks the boy’s blog.

I’ll be damned if there weren’t two posts there: one, a brief treatise on how to leave a map in Halo 3, and the other a correction to the first. He accomplished this with just the verbal instructions in the car. I repeat, he’s eight.

After this discovery, we immediately spent a little more time talking about how to correct a post, rather than posting a correction, how to upload and post images, what is and isn’t appropriate, how the spell checker works, and a few other things, and I pretty much left him to it. I will be monitoring things closely, of course, but I also see it as sort of an experiment; I’m interested to see if he sticks to it and what he’ll make of it.

All in all, a very productive and entertaining weekend. Poor Corrie Ann is still sick though, and my brother and his family are all quite sick as well (tis the season). Seems like everyone I know is either sick or recently recovered. Bleah. Here’s to hoping everyone is healthy soon!