My son is a moron.

Well, more precisely, he’s in the throes of adolescence, but still. Idiot.

My boys are all about the online games.  The 8 year old likes Andkon.com, and I don’t hate it because there aren’t popups.  And the games are like crack.  Bygones.  The 10-almost-11-he’ll-have-you-know year old likes more “sophisticated” games, like Runescape.  Runscape is WoW Jr., in case you don’t know.

Now, I did not take this “kids on the internet” thing lightly.  If I had it my way, we’d still have an avocado rotary phone hanging in the kitchen with an extra long curly cord any shade but avocado attached to it so that I could put my kids in the corner under the phone but then walk really far away from them to talk to my friend and totally forget they’re in there while they shuffle their feet and moan about being tired or hungry or something.  You know your mom did it, too.

Anyway, my point is that I still have a great amount of fear of technology.  Maybe ‘respect’ is the right word.  I just don’t think that I trust the internet that much just yet to hand my kids over to it.  They, of course, think I am some barbarian because I boil water rather than microwave it, so there’s that.

I think we’ve found a nice compromise, however.  I have to know of and approve of the sites they visit.  I have to be the one who registers them for use of any sites.  They can only be on the computer in the living room, and they are so afraid that someone is going to reach through the monitor and kidnap them, they’ll never ever chat online with anyone.  I’m not above scaring the crap out of them to get a job done.  My side of the deal is that I am open-minded and that I actually let them have internet time on occasion.

2of3 wanted me to get him signed up for Chaotic.com since he’s started in on those cards and dear god if something starts to smell over here it’s probably my dead, bloated corpse decaying under the mountain of abandoned Pokemon cards.  Help? and the thing kept telling us his email was already in use.  1of3 had registered an account about a week ago, so I asked him if maybe he’d set another one up under his brother’s email.  He said he hadn’t.  Okay.  I logged into 2of3′s email to see if there were any email notifications from Chaotic and oh my, were there.  I actually couldn’t figure out why it wouldn’t accept 2of3′s email, but what I did find out simply by logging into my 8 year old’s email was that my 10-almost-11-he’ll-have-you-know year old had set up several different Chaotic accounts for himself and used his 8 year old brother’s email address as the parent’s email.

And when I asked him, he denied it.

And when I asked him if he’d like to rethink that answer, he denied it again.

And when I turned the laptop around and showed him the five emails from Chaotic to 2of3, his parent, and asked him again, he denied it.  In the end, the most I got out of him at the end of it was an emphatic, “Iuhnoh.”

I can’t decide which is worse, that he was so amazingly stupid, or that he thought I was.  Either way, he’s grounded.  For, like, ever.