Chalk and Cheese is an old idiom that means:
"Two things that seem alike but which are in fact very different."
My twins are as different as chalk and cheese.
We have one PSP and two boys. Our PSP has been underutilized as anything but a gaming device. True, I use it to watch movie downloads, but I do so only after my boys have gone to bed and there isn't any competition for it. Otherwise, my boys only want to use it as a gaming device.
Today, the PSP is in time out. Let me just say that when you are a 5-year-old boy sharing a house with another 5-year-old boy, the hardest thing in the world to do is to share a PSP.
Although we make our boys earn the right to play the PSP (good behavior, etc), we only have one unit which means they have to alternate turns with it, 30 minutes each.
It's hard to get 5-year-old twin boys to share a gaming device and because we haven't figured out how each boy can have his own profile, they build instead on what each other has played and therefore, don't get the full experience of playing at each level.
We have one other portable gaming device at home, and it sits abandoned. My boys only have eyes on for the PSP. They used to love this other device. We tried making them alternate devices on road trips, but the boy who lands the "other" device always feels disappointed. Angry, even.
They each want their own PSP.
As the PSP sits untouched in time out, my boys have been trying hard to
reform their behavior. They know that if mommy were to win a trip to BlogHer '10 in New York City, she might leave the PSP behind!
Well, that's not entirely true. If I were to win a trip to BlogHer, I
might leave TWO PSPs behind. That's right, I would use the money I save on a conference pass to buy another PSP so that each of my boys would have his own.
I rarely buy two of anything for my boys but in this case, I think it
will save our family's sanity if we were to have two PSPs.
Of course, that might also mean we end up with two PSPs in time out. And two boys in time out as well.
Needless to say, my boys are rooting for me to go to BlogHer!
7/26/10 This contest is now closed. Congrats to the winner, megryansmom!
(You can skip my amateur video and scroll down for the giveaway.)
If we were to add up all the points my kids and I have accumulated playing games on the Sony PSP 3000, I would be the biggest loser.
Kids: 10,000 points Mom: 10 points
I'm just not good at video games.
Way back in the early days of video games, my brother and I used to play Super Mario, Asteroids and Defender. My brother excelled at video games, while I struggled. My parents tried to keep things fair, making us take turns using the two player option. His turn, my turn. His turn, my turn. Only my brother's turn would stretch to thirty minutes or longer, before it was my turn again. I'd be so excited and then, three scant minutes would go by... and I'd lose and then it would be my brother's turn yet again. I did all that waiting around just to have to wait around again.
Not fun.
I bought two games for our new Sony PSP: Toy Story 3 and Lego Harry Potter (see a great review of this game on Who's the Boss). Before I showed the game to my boys, I tried out the games, starting with Toy Story 3.
We were on the road for 13 hours! We drove and drove AND DROVE from my brother's house near Portland back to the Bay Area, stopping only once along the way, in Ashland where I swear I left a piece of my heart because I just love that city.
As our boys nodded off in the back seats, I sat there, bored. I'd lost cell phone service, so I couldn't check in on Twitter or Facebook, but fortunately, I had my new Sony PSP 3000 with me and remembered that it had come to me preloaded with two movies, Tooth Fairy and It's Complicated.
I chose to watch It's Complicated. I plugged in my headset and settled in to watch the movie. It was a nice change of pace to escape the boredom of the road. The little compact PSP fit snugly in the palms of my hands and the screen was big enough that I didn't have to squint to it. I spent about two hours watching Meryl and Alec pursue and reject and pursue and reject each other on-screen.
I am doing the happy dance to now have a new Sony product in my household. It's been years since I worked at Sony but I remember browsing through the Family store of the Silicon Vallley corporate office and how my friends would all try to get me to use my employee discount on B stock product.
I'm not a gamer and I'm sure I never would have bought myself a PSP with my employee discount. But that was well before kids. Now I'm all about keeping my kids entertained this summer so when I was invited by Sony Corporate Entertainment America to spend the summer with the Sony PlayStation 3000 as part of the PSP Summer Family Fun blogger program, I jumped at the chance.
Follow along as we go through our summer with the PSP in hand. This week, we're on a road trip from the Bay Area to the Pacific Northwest. We left our Leapsters at home and instead brought with us our new PSP.
While our travels won't take us anywhere exotic (sure wish I had relatives overseas!), I think our road trip travels mirror that of many American families. How will will handle road trip fatigue? How will we get our boys to share and not fight? I might not have all the answers and I will surely make some mistakes along the way, but it will be an adventure.
I will have a PlayStation network gift card worth $50 to giveaway next week...so stay tuned!
The famous Sony logo is gone. Like a tombstone over an empty grave, the granite monolithic sign stands sentinel over the once bustling but now empty San Jose campus of Sony Electronics. I paused my car to snap this picture, revisiting the past for a moment, just as people do when they drive by their childhood homes. Memories.
The vast parking lot is now empty. Weeds invade the walkway. The cavernous and impressive front lobby is but a hollow shell. I almost expected to see a tumbleweed blow by. The different work groups have been dissolved, relocated, spun off, etc, with the remnants of the much downsized San Jose campus now residing a few miles down the street. I had known that all this had happened, but still, it just seemed sad.
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