The iPass

 The iPass has come and gone in our house over the last 2 years.  What is an iPass you may wonder?  Well, it is a pass that allows use on any "i" item in our house (iPhone, iPad, iPod).  It was created a few months after we got our iPhones when we moved back to the states from Paraguay.  And it was created because the "need" our children felt to constantly use our technological gadgets were driving us nuts! It was out of hand!  Every five minutes our kids were asking if they could play on our phones.  And once one of them were playing, they all wanted to play.  And inevitably a fight would break out about whose turn it was and how the other sibling had played longer than them.  I decided there had to be a way to help them keep their playing time down and to help keep me from going insane.  Finally one day it hit me, and the iPass was born!  I took 3 note cards per child and on each one of them I wrote:  their names, "iPass" and the value: 10 minutes.  From then on, they received 3 iPass's per day, which meant they got 30 total minutes of time on the iPhone or iPad.  We told them that they could use them whenever they wanted to as long as we were not using it.  It worked miracles!  It was so nice not to be asked 5,000 times a day if someone could use my phone!  And the kids happily accepted that they only got 30 minutes in 10 minute intervals to play games.  And they could blow it all at once or they could divide it up throughout the day.  It worked so good that as they stopped asking to use our phones constantly, we would kind of "drop" the whole iPass requirements.  But several times over the last two years we have had to reinstate them.  As we have gone through the process many times, I finally got smart and created a little chart that hangs in our den.  The picture is below.  I put velcro pieces on a poster board and they "pass their iPasses" back and forth from "Time left to play" to "already played" so that we know who has used how many and we actually know where the iPasses are! And we taught them how to set the clock on the iPhone for a 10 minute alarm so we don't have to remind them when their 10 minutes are up. We have just entered another season of the iPass this week, so iPasses are in full swing in our house!