An Unhealthy Obsession?

So my nephews were in town this past weekend - they are six and three. The three year old pretty much kept himself occupied in front of the 61-inch TV watching Sprout...the six year old is more into playing games on the computer.

Kevin, the older one, brought with him his new pet, Lucky. Lucky is a stuffed, baby Dalmatian. He is the product of this group of animals called Webkinz. For a good part of the weekend, Kevin, his mother (my sister) and I were on the Webkinz website trying to earn money for Lucky to buy him food and furnishings for his apartment. Confused? Let me explain.

Apparently, you buy this Webkinz plush toy and each comes with a code. You go home, log into Webkinz.com and your toy comes to life on the internet. You can play games to make money, buy it food, check on it's health, put it to bed, buy it toys, etc. It's almost like the Cabbage Patch Kids of our generation except they took it one step further by putting it on the internet. It's actually a good idea - the games are innocent enough and some are even educational. And then it really teaches the kids to take care of something, as if they had a real pet.

In an effort to help Kevin make money so that he could feed Lucky and buy him a bathtub for his sparse bathroom, Amy and I spent countless hours on the internet playing this one word game...it was like scrabble except the letters were not very favorable. It was set up in a five-by-five square - there were about 25 tiles of letters. And in all the tiles, you could have three Gs, a V, a Z, two Ds, etc, and only two vowels - A and I....again, not too favorable. Amy and I were wracking our brains trying to come up with words with good values. Not only that, if you could end your word with the letter in the center square, that was worth even more. So here we are, two thirty-somethings, playing on a kids' website, coming up with large words that no six-year old would ever use, on a late Saturday night. We had to reach the goal number in order to move onto the next round - and you could only submit ten words - and in each round, the goal became larger...so for instance, in the first round, your goal is to get 100 points over ten words. In round two, your goal would be to get 120 points over ten words, etc. We got to round eight - I think it was 300 points over ten words. I had the notepad out to take stock in possible words and their point values, and a calculator to make sure we were on track with our averages. Amy thought I was taking it too seriously. Me? I play to win!

Needless to say, after 1.5 hours and eight rounds, we were tired. We had to stop and put Lucky into his virtual bed. But now, I'm a little obsessed. I was thinking of going to "adopt" a Webkinz pet of my own just so I can play the games. Better yet, I can log in as Kevin, since he was so trusting with his login and password, and play for him. Unfortunately, I would get caught in no time because you're only allowed to login and earn money every eight hours or so after your last session....I don't want to take away Kevin's chances of earning money for his pet. My other thought was getting a Webkinz pet for my other nephew, Toph. He's only three but he could be my "mask" - my mask of shame at wanting to play on a kids' website!