Recently I was talking with some friends who just had their first child a few months back and I was telling the husband how they don’t believe it now but their lives will change. He is one of these gadget guys who goes out and gets damn near every new electronic gadget just as soon as they come out. IPODs, HDTVs, Wii, BluRay, Playstation, X-Box, PSP, you name it. He has everything from the huge ass projector TV to the little bitty hand-held PSP that plays videos, the Iphone and so on. Don’t get me wrong, I love those kinds of things too, but I have kids. Which is what I was telling him, how those things will soon go by the way side. Well they may not go by the wayside but how the importance of them will.
I was telling him how I am just not going to drop tons of cash on an HDTV or Blu-Ray player right now for several reasons. One, the stuff that I let my kids watch don’t come in HD and if they did my kids wouldn’t know the difference or care. Two, I would probably pass out when one of my lovely children drew on my plasma TV screen with a marker or something like that. Three, my son is obsessed with putting crap into every free space that he can find. And four, right now, I would rather take the money that I could spend on a nice state of the art media set up and get the hell out of town for a while, sans youngens.
As our conversation continued I told him how the other day I had to fish some Ritz crackers out of a VCR (see reason three above) when he stopped me and said, “You still have a VCR?” To which I replied, “Dude, did you hear the fishing the Ritz crackers out part? That’s why I don’t have a Blu-Ray player right now. How pissed do you think I would be if I just dropped $700 on a Blu-Ray player (or what ever they cost) just for my son to see if it could play a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?” So yeah, I am missing out on all of the joys of high definition right now but my kids are still breathing on their own and CPS hasn’t come to pay us a visit either, so that’s a good thing.
A few days after this conversation I went over to their house to find the husband sitting in the living room, right in front of his HD set up watching re-runs of “The Andy Griffith Show” on broadcast TV. Yeah, HD in black and white is killer!
Don’t get dead
5 comments:
He'll learn... He'll be shaking his blue-ray player to get the arm of a power ranger out of it, or something equally horrifying. Smile when you think of the fact that when you DO invest in stuff like that, midgets are not going to ruin your stuff. :)
So far the worst my almost 2 yr old has done is use a permanent black marker on a new expensive comforter from a 10 piece set I bought - my first matching set ever. It was a $500 set - for which I paid $100 on ebay... but still. My bro put pennies in our VCR like it was a piggy bank - Andrea's now husband.
Andrea - See you know!
Kimber - Yikes! Even for the deal you got on it, $100. Yikes!
I'n my frugal defense it came with curtains and everything you can think of. It was my first set ever in my life and I was very excited about it. I made her feel all kinds of guilty for it.
Kim - Nothing wrong with being frugal. I bet there are a lot of people who wished they were more frugal right about now. And yeah, as a parent you sort of have to make them feel guilty about it. Of course with me then I get to feeling guilty for making them feel guilty. I am a softy.
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