Do you have to ask your kids’ permission to use your iPad?

Like many other par­ents, we some­times have dif­fi­culty pry­ing our son’s grubby hands off the iPad. Ever since the first ver­sion was released, Kai has taken to it like a true iOS native.

He now thinks that every screen is a multi-touch screen, and has been seen try­ing to swipe shop­ping malls’ elec­tronic direc­to­ries to change pages.

I was think­ing of how to sum­marise what we use our iPad(s) for, now that the iPad2 comes with a cam­era (and I was treated to some of the many amaz­ing things it could do) — but really, it all comes down to what Kai does with it:

1. Angry Birds
2. Talk­ing Gina
3. Talk­ing Tom
4. iDP FREE
5. Cat Piano Jr
6. iBooks
7. YouTube
8. Videos
9. KidsSongs

When we got our car last year, we thought about deck­ing it out with the lat­est in Audio-Visual enter­tain­ment, you know, like an in-headrest DVD player with tv tuner — the works, basi­cally. And we were aston­ished at the price.

So last year, when iPad1 was released, we said to our­selves, “buy­ing two 3G iPads and hol­sters for the head­rest is cheaper than buy­ing an in-car DVD player!”, and went out and did just that.

Kai has never looked back since (cos as long as we put the iPad in the head­rest holder, he’s look­ing for­ward), and enjoys long car rides watch­ing his favourite Dis­ney movies, Sesame Street YouTube playlists, his favourite music videos on an iTunes playlist, or sim­ply prac­tice his num­bers one to twenty some­thing and let­ters A-Z on one of many many apps that we’ve down­loaded for him.

In the other pas­sen­ger seat, we’ve also put up an iPad holder so that Naomi can do her own stuff look­ing up maps to give me direc­tions to where we’re going, or to check Twit­ter to see if anyone’s warn­ing about some mall flood­ing. Noth­ing beats a back­seat dri­ver with real-time infor­ma­tion and forecasts.

Now with the iPad2, Kai’s in-car enter­tain­ment can be inter­rupted by Face­Time calls while we’re on the move.

I don’t know how he feels about that.