The Working Mom

Dr. Seuss is one of my all time favorite children’s book authors. I loved the books as a kid, and as an adult, I still love reading the books to my kids. So it should probably come as no surprise that the Dr. Seuss iPhone apps totally thrill me and my kids.

The Cat In the Hat

Love this book. For some reason, I feel like this book relates to my life on so many levels. From the thing one and thing two ransacking the house (=cough= Zach and Rachel =cough=) to suddenly finding yourself in a mess that is “so deep and so tall” you can not pick it up, there is no way at all… except a cat with a magical room cleaning machine never seems to show up at my doorstep. Hmmm… This eBook has it all. The ability to have it read to you or read it yourself. Little animations, little interactions, even a little background sound, music and effects. (There’s settings to turn those off too if you don’t like them) This is the way an eBook should be done.

The Cat in the Hat: $3.99* (NOTE!! See below about a special price on this app for March 2, 2010 only!!)

Dr. Seuss’s ABC

I have to admit – reading this book myself isn’t as much fun as reading The Cat in the Hat – but having the eBook read TO YOU it is actually alot more fun. Somehow the reader on the eBook does a much better job. (Maybe it’s also because I seem to get tongue tied reading this book long before I’m even halfway in) LOL! Either way – this book is great. Sound effects, interaction. If you leave the book in the middle, it will even remember where you left off and give you the option of starting there when you start the book/app again.

Dr. Seuss’s ABC: $3.99* (NOTE!! See below about a special price on this app for March 2, 2010 only!!)

Dr. Seuss Camera – The Cat in the Hat Edition

Ok, this is a lot of fun. My kids LOVE playing with the camera on the phone, so this is a no brainer. You can pick out a “frame” and then take a picture or use one from your photo library or camera roll – usually putting someone’s face inside a cartoon – and then save it, email it. You can add “stickers” to it, etc. My only comment here is that the icons on the bottom are a little ambigous and took a little getting used to understand what they did. But exploring and playing with the app was so much fun, we didn’t mind.

Dr. Seuss Camera – The Cat in the Hat Edition: $2.99* (NOTE!! See below about a special price on this app for March 2, 2010 only!!)

NOTE!: So now here’s something really cool: Oceanhouse Media (the developer of these apps) is celebrating Dr. Seuss’s birthday and NEA’s Read Across America Day by dropping all Dr. Seuss iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad apps to $0.99 each for one day only, Tuesday, March 2, 2010. Definitely recommend you scoop these up tomorrow while they’re on sale. That’s a great deal!! You can read more about that here

Click here to learn more, see demos and see more Dr. Seuss apps

*prices at time of this writing.

I remember sitting at my friend’s kitchen table when I was about 11 and plotting out my life on a little piece of paper: I would be married to some movie star, living in a shack, with 30 kids, driving a jaguar. Hmmm. This of course is from the game “MASH” (Mansion, Apartment, Shack, House). Emily’s Girl Talk includes this game plus a few more: a game called “Lemon”, another called “Love”, and the fortune telling classic “Cootie Catcher”. The app is targeted for tweens and teens, and my daughter loved it. The graphics are as cute as can be. This is definitely a game she and her friends will be playing and giggling over. It saves all the results from your games as “stories” in a journal. Also, if you just want to play the games without typing endless names, you can always click an “emily picks” button that will fill the fields in with random names. (I do wish there was an “auto-clear” – once the names are filled in, it’s not easy to remove them).

Emily’s Girl Talk is produced by Broken Thumbs Apps. Read more about them and buy the app on iTunes here.

Also, to celebrate the release of Emily’s Girl Talk, fans can enter a contest to become a sticker inside the game, by (i) posting a screenshot of their favorite story from Emily’s Girl Talk on the new Facebook fan page, (ii) tweeting it to @EmilysGirlTalk on Twitter or (iii) emailing it to EmilysGirlTalk@BrokenThumbsApps.com by April 1st.

Emily’s Girl Talk: $0.99*

*Price at time of this writing.

Last week, Rachel was with a friend and got herself into a situation that she wasn’t entirely comfortable with, and couldn’t easily contact me to get her. She was at a sleepover, and even though the parents I had entrusted her care to thought they weren’t doing anything wrong, they did. (I don’t want to get into specifics, but because obviously this can easily be taken the wrong way, I’ll just say this has to do with a religion issue and not anything else). I was furious, and while I learned a hard lesson about the fact that, unfortunately, I’m going to have to be a lot more careful about who I allow her to have sleepovers with and who I trust, I also realized I need to give her the ability to more easily reach out to me if she needs to.

She’s been begging me for a cell phone for maybe a year or more now and it’s been one of those things that I’ve honestly laughed at. A nine year old with a cell phone?? You’ve GOT to be kidding me!!! Well… now my tune is changing. Fact is – if she had a cell phone at that sleepover, when things started getting a little over the top, she could have snuck away and called me and said “Mom? Uhm… Think I’m ready to come home now!”

Of course, being 9 years old, there’s all kinds of issues here. One problem is that I’m reasonbly sure this phone is going to get lost. Sooner rather than later, I’ll bet. The other issue is that, I can’t be 100% sure that she’ll forever get the idea that this phone is not to be used to chat it up with her friends. It’s to be used for me to contact her or her to contact me. If she wants to talk to her friends, we do actually have a landline phone she can use to her heart’s content. (Or at least until it’s time to do her homework or go to bed. LOL!)

So, after much debate, we finally got her one of those Tracfones. The particular model we got for her actually does text messaging, (so I can easily send her a text message to come home from her friends house at a specified time, if need be – and it only uses up 1/3 of a minute), it has voicemail, even a little camera. You buy minutes via a card (and actually the model phone we got doubles the minutes you buy for the life of the phone) – and if she uses up the minutes – that’s it – the phone stops working until we add more minutes. There’s no monthly or daily charge. And it’s not tied to our credit card. So no worries about a surprise $500 phone bill because she decided to sneak a few calls to some friends. And the phone itself only cost about $20. So while I really hope she doesn’t lose the phone – it’s only $20. It’s not like $200. And the phone? I mean for $20… that’s a pretty sweet deal – which is why I finally caved. I mean, I think I couldn’t get a decent walkie-talkie for only that much!

So yeah – I’m pretty sure only a few months ago I was saying “I would never buy my kid a cell phone!! Not until they’re at least 13 or something…” Yeah. Funny how circumstance will change things. That and the technology that can put out a $20 cell phone!

PicPocket Books has taken a number of picture books and brought them into digital media. Here is a selection of books from this publisher:

My Friend Isabelle ($1.99*) is a story about two friends, one of which has Downs Syndrome. It compares how they are alike and how they are different and helps teach tolerance and acceptance.

In Racers ($0.99*) kids talk about formula race cars and trucks and would be perfect for a kid who is fascinated by fast cars. Pictures of kids with funny expressions accompany the colorful pictures.

Sleeping Beauty ($1.99*) is the classic fairy tale with beautiful watercolor illustrations that go along with the story. A page is read and then the illustrations are displayed.

Round Is A Mooncake ($2.99*) has the most interactivity in the series of books. The story goes through various shapes a little girl finds in her world. Many of the shapes are Asian oriented. Throughout the story are a few animals that when you touch them, they make noise.

In all the books, you have the ability to pause, skip ahead or go back, but beyond that the interactivity in the books is limited. They are basically animations that play on their own without requiring the reader to take part in the story. In some respects, this may be a good thing. If you have a kid that likes to have a story read to them without their needing to constantly click “next” to see the next page, then these would definitely work out well. However, in that case, I almost wish they were simple animations/videos, rather than an app. With an application, if you don’t interact with it, the screen will dim and the phone will auto-lock. (Yes you can adjust the length of time before it does this in the settings, however, for battery preservation I keep this to 1 minute and wouldn’t really want to change it, especially when the kids are playing with the phone as they have a tendency to not manually turn it off when they’re done using it. Perhaps relying on that 1 minute auto-lock). To make these more useful as an application, however, would be to make use of the interactivity available with this medium. Websites sometimes fall prey to this as well – “brochureware” is typically the type of site that has just been given the most minimal interactivity and is otherwise an exact duplicate of printed material or lives instead of printed material. There’s nothing wrong with “brochureware” type websites or applications. They certainly have their place – but they do miss the opportunity to become something even more engaging when passing up the interactivity features that could really help capture their audience.

*price(s) at time of this writing.

Update: Just wanted to include this response by the publisher:

I wanted to let you know that we are adding animations to some titles that are currently in production. The animations are subtle, like snow falling or stars twinkling, because we publish previously published books rather than made-for-iPhone stories – so the artwork is already drawn, and we strive to remain faithful to the original book. Our intent is to encourage curiosity by adding elements of interactive discovery to each title which the hot spots and subtle animations provide. We are consciously NOT creating video games, but hope that PicPocket Books can offer a gentle alternative to games for parents who want to offer their children mobile digital books.

We are also going to be introducing a new feature in our next releases wherein the page turns are controlled by a simple swipe of the finger. That way, if a child wants to just flip through and see the pictures of the book without waiting for all the words, they can do that easily.

Mandy and Andy Renovating is a interactive children’s book for the iPhone that feature two cats. In this particular story, they go about trying to help a friend renovate a house that is apparently filled with hidden forest animals throughout.

I really like how these books made for the iPhone take advantage of the ability to engage the viewer by encouraging them to click/touch on various parts of the picture on the “page.” In this book, you click on parts of the picture to find these hidden animals. Also, this book comes in a few different languages: English, French, and Chinese and there are apparently plans to add more languages in the future. There is also the option to have the book read aloud, or the child can read and/or explore the book themselves.

Mandy and Andy Renovating is created by Beiz. You can learn more about them here: http://www.beiz.com/games.html

Mandy and Andy Renovating: $1.99*

*price at time of this writing.

So no sooner do I make this post, my son turns the table on me. Who knows, maybe he can read, AND he reads my blog and figured he confuse me. Almost since the very moment I hit publish on that post, he’s been a lot better behaved. I won’t even presume to say he’s over his “phase,” I know he’s not. And it’s not like he’s given up tantrums and whining 100% – he’s just turned them down to once/twice a day and turned down the duration from several hours to just a few minutes. I can TOTALLY live with this.

The other thing – and I’m not sure what to make of this – is “manners” has become a game to him. It’s become “fun” to try and come up with as many things to thank me for as possible. This… is really weird. Don’t get me wrong – I am loving the appreciation, but I feel like there’s got to be a catch somewhere.

“Thank you Mommy for making me dinner”
“You’re welcome”
“Thank you Mommy for the spoon”
“You’re welcome”
“Thank you Mommy for the napkin”
“You’re… welcome…”
“Thank you Mommy for the water”
“uh… actually you got yourself a cup of water…”
“Oh… then thank you for the cup so I could get myself some water”
“uh… you’re… welcome..?”

He’s got to be plotting something. Trying to distract me so he can catch me off guard. This just isn’t normal.

Well, still, I guess I’ll be blissfully ignorant (and slightly paranoid) in the meantime. However, I’m sure that clicking the “publish” button on this post is a guarantee this momentary blip will come to an end. It sure was cute while it lasted!

Find Bruce is a very simple and fun game for little kids of varying degrees of ability with the iPhone. Bruce (the moose) goes to hide in the scenery. To look around, just swipe the screen. You can click on the trees, bushes, mushrooms and rocks in the picture. If Bruce isn’t there, the item jumps up to show you. Once you spot Bruce’s antlers peeking out from behind where he is hiding, Bruce appears on the screen. The graphics are cute, as well as the background music that plays. There’s no way to “lose” playing, as you can look around in the garden for as long as you like.

To learn more about Find Bruce and see a video demo, go to www.findbruce.com

Find Bruce: $0.99*

*price at time of this writing.

FrootDrop is a purely for-fun game for kids – at the start of the app you’ll see a picture of a tree with funny-faced fruit hanging from it. The whole point of the game is to click on the fruit and they’ll spring free from the tree with giggling sound effects that had my son giggling too while he played. When you clear the tree, a new one appears with more fruit to make you laugh.

FrootDrop is created by GooseRhymes Designs.

FrootDrop: $0.99*

*price at time of this writing.

The Fuzzy Fierce Peach tells a cute story about a peach who’s sure that he’ll be the first peach picked this season. But things don’t go according to plan and he learns that being first isn’t what’s important. There are options to have the text displayed along with the pictures (or not), as well as have a narrator tell the story (or not). The thing your child will really get a kick out of with this particular iPhone storybook, is that you can interact with the pictures and move the characters around in each frame. In fact, you can turn the “story” portion off and just play with the pictures by themselves.

The Fuzzy Fierce Peach is created by GooseRhymes Designs. You can see a video about the storybook here.

The Fuzzy Fierce Peach: $1.99*

*price at time of this writing.

I have to start by saying that I absolutely adore my son. I love him with every fiber in me. But… (you knew it was coming, right?) I feel like we’ve been in a phase with him that has been never-ending. I know he’s not the worst behaved kid in the world, but he is far from one of the better behaved kids. It’s like we’re walking on egg-shells – anything can set him off, and once that happens he will range from either just being generally whiney to on-the-floor tantrum. Keeping him happy is really hard work and he’s extremely high maintenance.

After the presents were opened on Christmas, we spent the rest of the day trying to prevent the kids from killing each other. I read tweets from other people who were “spending a quiet afternoon with their family”… how exactly does one do that? If the kids are home, especially if Zach is home – there is no such thing as a quiet afternoon.

This weekend I took the kids to see The Princess and The Frog (which I LOVED by the way. Great movie! Yes, scary in parts, but not as bad as some other Disney movies I’ve seen!) Long story short – Zach basically had a total screaming meltdown after the movie that lasted a good two hours and ended up making me sick with a migraine.

We are trying to figure out how to restrict his access to the house overnight – otherwise he will literally ransack the place. He gets into and empties out cabinets he knows he’s not allowed to get into (this includes breaking through “childproof” locks), he gets things out of the fridge and leaves them all over the house. I don’t know if it’s a sleep-walking thing, but because he seems so proud of himself when we wake up and discover what he’s done, I’m not sure.

I joked on Twitter the other day that I wondered if there really was a Nanny911. I’d love for them to come in and help me out. I’m not talking about going to one of those “Love and Logic” seminars – or following the advice of a book (I’ve read a bunch). I’m talking about someone coming in and seeing our specific problems and coaching me on how to deal with it. The things that happen in my house never seem to follow the examples in the books or seminars. I need a Nanny911!

There’s so many cute things that go along with a child who is 4 years old, but there is so much going on with him that makes me can’t wait until this phase is over. (Please let this all just be a phase). I read about other moms who get so upset watching their kids get older – meanwhile, I’m the complete opposite. And at the same time I feel like I’m missing out on something. Why is this all so difficult? Why can’t it all be just games and fun and snuggling. I mean there is that too, but it’s overshadowed with so much whining and tantrums and bothering his sister for no reason at all…

I know it’ll get better. But sometimes I’d like someone to tell me how much longer. Are we there yet?

Added after: Ironically, I was talking with my mother about my nephew who is just a month older than Zach, and his behavior recently is apparently just about the same as Zach’s. So hopefully that’s some proof that it’s not just ME/MY FAULT he’s acting this way and it’s more to do with his age and he’ll grow out of it. Eventually. Heh.