Funny Christmas-ish Story...

Ok the marathon of Blog updating is almost over! We are almost all caught up! I just wanted to take a small detour and share a tidbit involving Steven and Christmas presents.

One present in particular in fact.

My fantastic parents gave the boys Alphie for Christmas.  For those of you who aren't familiar with Alphie, He is a toy robot.  He has these cards that fit into his tummy and then he asks questions about each card that use math, matching, colors, letters etc. It is actually a really cool learning toy that we all had our turn with on Christmas day.
 My younger brother Brian had one when we were growing up and we all loved him and played with  him until we completely wore him out .  We have many memories of sitting in the hall coat closet with the door shut playing with Alphie in the dark so we could watch his lights blink.

So now my boys have the new Alphie.

 Sam is still a little bit young so Alphie doesn't hold his attention for super long, but Steven will sit and play with Alphie for hours. I love it because Alphie is teaching his all sorts of things.  The problem comes in that Steven mostly uses Alphie as a radio of sorts.
One of Alphie's cards has pictures of instruments on it and when you push the corresponding button, that instrument plays. If you hit all of the buttons, all of the instruments play simultaneously.  So Steven puts in the instrument card, gets the music playing, and then leaves Alphie in the middle of the floor while he dances around it.  While it's cute to watch, I felt that Alphie's abilities were being wasted.  So I asked Steven if he wanted to get a music player. He thought this was a great idea so he used his Christmas money and bought this:

It's the Discovery Kids Digital Boombox.  I found it online at Bed, Bath and Beyond.  I found this after a LONG search for a music player that I liked.  This one is nice because it' actually an MP3 player. You hook it up to the computer and load the music onto it, and then it plays what is on it's memory. It came in the mail this afternoon and Steven hasn't put it down since.  There was one little adventure in the beginning where I got the batteries in (finally!) but couldn't get it to turn on. I hopped online to see if I could find a solution to this problem, thinking that I was going to be sending it back.  Steven is next to me patiently waiting, and pushing buttons and he says to me "I got it to turn on!"

 Apparently it really is for kids when the adults can't even get it to turn on!