The girls each have an iPad from school. Miriam's is a regular one and Magdalena's is a mini. They use them all the time at school, but they're also allowed to bring them home every day and even on weekends.
Before that, our whole family shared one iPad mini, but it was really Jeremy's and the girls only used it occasionally on Saturdays. Sometimes I was worried that the girls would fall behind in this world of digital natives because they didn't use devices very much. It was good to know that they weren't rotting their brains from staring at a screen too much, of course, but these days, devices are so integral to how the world works that I sometimes felt I was putting them at a disadvantage.
So it's nice to know they're all caught up now. It's amazing the creative things they do with iPads - take and edit photos, create music, write stories and fact books, and even shoot trailers for pretend movies. They also have fun pestering Siri and checking the weather for themselves before school.
That said, while I'm relieved they're all caught up on their device proficiency, it is annoying that reaching for the iPad is sometimes their default behavior now. It never was before when it was just the one iPad and the iPad was Dad's, you know? Jeremy and I have had to be on our toes to make sure that when they're on the iPad, it's for creative reasons and not brain-rotting reasons, and even then, not for too long. And we are now intimately familiar with that most annoying of child behaviors, after you've asked them five times to put the iPad away: "Let me just..." "After I..." "Wait, no, Mama, really! I have to..." until you are physically prying the thing out of their fingers as they continue trying to swipe a few last things. Not my favorite thing.
But thanks, Finnish public school, for the use of the iPads!
