My kids...

You know you play wii too much when your 20 month old walks in the room and says "I wanna play wii". He doesn't play, he's still too small but that doesn't prevent him from trying. In fact, I've seen him push Collin right off the balance board and squat and then stand like you do when you're ski jumping on the wii fit.

Speaking of Collin, he's proven to me that branding and marketing really work. We went to Uno's in Baltimore for dinner the other night and as we were sitting there he looked out the window and got all excited. "Look! There's Best Buy!" Sure enough, right down the street was the Best Buy. Driving home from seeing Disney on Ice with his Dad tonight they passed a billboard and Collin excitedly pointed out "Look Dad! There's the Geico money with the eyes and the mouth!" Those adds are fairly new but they obviously got his attention.

My sister is a marketing major and she told me to turn Collin loose in the cereal aisle in the grocery store and tell him he could pick any box of cereal he wanted but it could only be one box. She said most kids take forever to pick a box. My kid did not. He went straight for the Coco Puffs. Uh, No. Try again. This time he picked Cookie Crisps. Still a no. Lucky Charms? Not on your life, pal. None of those cereals are healthy. What I also realized while I was doing this little experiment was that none of the healthy cereals were where he could see them. All the sugar filled crap was right at his eye level and all the good for you stuff was up at mine. We did not get a box of cereal by the way. When I turned Collin loose I asked him which box he would get if we were buying cereal and made it clear that we were not because we had plenty of Cheerios left at home. It was an enlightening experience to say the least.