Luke loves Minecraft. This has been established with his past birthday party and and the endless amount of hours he has put in either building worlds or watching videos about building worlds. Yes I know, hours on the computer…. not healthy…. I know I know.
And with everyone in my family having the summer off BUT me and personally involved in their own love affair with an LCD screen or game control, there’s not a lot of whip cracking going on.
I was trying to come up with a way that I could either have a time limit set for him and it would log him out after so long. So in comes my secret weapon Team Viewer.
Team Viewer is a program that lets you view another computer through remote control. Its a great program. I used it to access a file I needed from work while on vacation. Yes I know I was supposed to be on vacation but it was just one time. So I figured why can’t I make this thing work in reverse.
Secretly at lunch I installed the program at home. Sternly wagged my finger saying “Stay off the computer! Go read a book!”
Which I must add he does voraciously, usually at night… then I’m finger-wagging-sternly-berating-it’s-late-go-to-bed. Yes maybe I should lighten up. It’s summer after all.
I leave knowing full well (kind of hoping) that my extra bendy finger display would not be heeded. After an hour or so I decided to sneak a little peak. And what do I see, the blocky sprawling world of Minecraft before me. (Yes I should be grateful it wasn’t something much worse. But I have good kids. But I also sometimes trust them about as far as I can throw them)
How to intervene? How to throw down “the mom”? Team Viewer has a few different contact options. There is the traditional chat which I tried but he didn’t seem to notice. Then I noticed the voice option.
“Luke, this is your mother. Get off the computer!”
Everything froze……then. Windows were closing. Cursors were flying.
Then came the slow occasionally backspaced typing manner of a 9 year old. (I Know this because i can see his screen and see the text box as he sees it, kind of cool 🙂
“you scared the heck out of me!!!!!!!!”
He could hear me but had no way of talking back. Isn’t that every parents secret dream?
He did quite playing Minecraft. I’d like to think he read for a while or played outside or even unloaded the dishwasher. Hey it’s my secret dream, remember! it was sweet that he did spend the last 30min of my workday chatting with me. When was I coming home? He missed me. Everyone was boring at the house.
So end of the story…. Big Brother? NSA? Get real. We Moms will hunt you down and find it out.
This. Is. Amazing. I'm so happy it can be useful to someone other than Nathan. I see him creepily using our computer in our office at home when he is at work “on the phone with contacts”…..sure, you are. lol
This. Is. Amazing. I'm glad that program was actually useful! Nathan uses it all the time. I'll be walking by our office and see our home computer having windows opening, the cursor clicking around, etc all while he is supposedly at work on the phone with various contacts… SURE he is.
Very cool! Going to have to check out that program. Love being “Big Mother”! 🙂
That is AWESOME! I make mine play Minecraft on the Xbox so they can only play with people we approve, so not sure that would work. Gonna check it out!