When I was 7 probably the worst thing I ever did was drive my little sister insane and by extension my parents. Sure as I grew up I broke stuff around the house by accident with or because of my little sister but that was expected. Kids had getting into trouble like that for literally ever.
Welcome to the 21st century.
Two (very unaware how really lucky they are) 7 & 5 year boys got 8GB iPod Touches from Santa this year in our house hold. While Santa gets all the praise and adulation, geek dad gets all the work.
While Apple stuff “just works” exceptionally well for 20 something hipsters with lots of money and no kids. I have discovered that so much of iOS was really not meant to “just work” with a family sharing only one Apple ID. Sorry I’m on a budget and I’m not buying Angry Birds 5 times.
Facetime & iMessage
Like any geek dad I have created respectable gmail accounts for my children so that when they are older it will help them get into the right schools, get the right jobs and marry European supermodels. You are welcome boys. In the meantime I’ll be associating them with the two different iPods so that both Facetime and iMessage will work. I was not impressed the first time I sent a test iMessage to my iPhone from my son’s iPod and it appeared on every iOS device and it looked like I was having a conversation with myself.
Game Center
As Facetime & iMessage was fun to setup, getting Game Center up and running nearly had me sacrificing live stock on the alter of Apple to get things up and running.
Since I had used the first email with Facetime and iMessage I was foolish enough to think I could use it again to create a Game Center account for each iPod. Game Center said that those email addresses were already associated with accounts and could not be used. So I had to then create two more gmail accounts to associate with Game Center. That’s when I realized that I had to create one for my wife as she had been playing on my Game Center account for the pass year on her iPhone.
Passcodes
What could be cooler for little kids than to have a secret password that only they know. It’s normal and probably natural in their psychological development to grow up to be self sufficient adults and marry those European supermodels. The downside? Geek dads getting a call at work saying that one of the kids figured out how to enable a pass code on his iPod Touch and to just as quickly to completely and utterly forget it. After following a few steps I was able to wipe the iPod Touch, restore it to factory settings and use the iCloud backup.
iCloud
But it’s not all night Google searches for iOS help and sobbing children. iCloud has already been a god send in having a recent backup of the passcoded iPod Touch. I knew that I would not be able to back up the kid’s iPod Touches and my wife’s iPhone on a regular schedule so knowing that iCloud is backing them up almost daily has at least taken one burden off my back.
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