Don't get me wrong. I had a wonderful Christmas break. We got the kids lots of new toys and got only a few presents for each other. We got to hang out for two long weekends watching movies, swimming, doing the park, and just relaxing. Some of the presents were somewhat lacking though.
One of them was the V-Tech V-Smile Video game (Sounds Dr. Suess'ish) system that we got for Ian. The product 
markings all said 3+ and we like to think of our kid's as pretty smart so I didn't think it'd be an issue. Ian likes to play video games, and can move a mouse around well enough to click and drag his way to having fun on a computer, so I thought that the control issue would be solved as well. The games that came with this system look like old NES games but it's a learning machine right? I go to get it setup and it requires batteries. A video game station that requires batteries? Ok. Jackie made a battery run and we were off.
Ian took a look at the big joystick and had no idea what to do. He could point out the different colors: "Where's blue? Good boy!" and that's about it. We kept saying, "Up, go Up. Left, now left, noooooow left...now!" Eventually though he'd just go, "Dadda you do it." Great. Now I have to help my son play games. The puzzles and other things are pretty hard too. For a 3 year old to recognize a pattern, then move the joystick to a particular location all while under a timer...are you kidding me?
The next on the list was Tickle Me Elmo TX. We got three of these things because we thought that we'd be able to sell them on ebay or something to recoup the cost. No one's buying them. Not a biggie as we can give them to other people as presents so not a total loss. The machine is pretty fun, for about an hour. It's Elmo, and our daughter is a huge fan. She played with Elmo and it got some laughs out of her for about 30 minutes. Then the adults played around with him to see what he could do. He would sit down, wiggle his feet, and even stand back up again. Pretty cute and even got a chuckle out of us. After the novelty wears off though, Elmo becomes just another stuffed animal.
Daddy got a GPS device from Microsoft, with their software titled "Street and Trips 2007". The GPS device seems cool enough, it even gives you altitude, which is pretty sweet. The software that's bundled with it though blows monkey chunks. We tried to use it to find a Golden Wok that was in our vicinity. I typed in Golden Wok into the prompt. It gave me Golden Wok's in Florida, Chicago, and then proceeded to dole out results like, "Golden Way, St PN", "Goldey Locks, Blvd, MN"...WTF? You would have thought that it would be easy. 99% of the time I want to know how to go from point A, my current location, to point B, where I would like to end up. If you click on the "Locate Me" button it has no idea where you are. It searches for Wi-Fi locations, which makes no sense at all, as the freaking GPS device itself that came with the damn software will tell you where I am. You end up having to go the "GPS Pane" which then allows you to track yourself, after you click on some options to center your position on the map. Man that was horribly non-intuitive. Plus, the only difference I can see in the interface from a screenshot of version 2005 is that they updated the UI with a button to search Windows Live. Thanks MS. That really helps. Assholes.
It takes me about 3 minutes to put in a simple path. What a pain in the ass. I'm hoping that there's some other GPS software out there that can at least make the GPS thing more fun. Maybe Google Earth? I'll have to report back on that one.
All was not lost though. The Weebles castle that both kids got was a hit. They're still playing with it, along with the Krabby pattie station, and other Elmo gadgets like the drill and fishing pole thingy. They love their bikes and they want to take them to the park each day.