As parents, one of our greatest desires is that our children have more than we did growing up.  Although my children are only aged 4 and 5, I'm pretty much done as a parent by these standards.  My kids already have much more than I had when I was in my twenties.  My late twenties.

For example, my five year old son Christopher has a Sega Genesis video game machine.  OK, it's true that my wife actually made a profit obtaining the Sega.  She came across it at a rummage sale for three dollars.  It came in a bag that also contained a controller for another game system, and a couple of games we didn't want.  Theresa took the "extra stuff" to a pawn shop where she sold it for five dollars.  As I may have mentioned in a previous column, you would probably not want to buy a used car from my wife.

But my point is, in "my day" (as we 31 year old geezers are fond of saying) five year old kids did not have video game systems.  We only had towels, which we dug out of the clothes hamper and tied around our necks in order to become flying super heroes.  I have to wonder what self-respecting super hero would fly around in a flower-print cape that smelled suspiciously like a wet dog, but that's just the kind of hardship and adversity "my generation" had to deal with.  I guess it's true: what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

And then there is my daughter Elizabeth, who has a video tape of every single movie ever made that contains an animated character with merchandising tie-ins.  As if that weren't enough, she and Christopher have access to cartoons 24 hours per day via cable television.  When I was a kid, we sure didn't have VCRs or cable television, at least where I lived.  The only cartoons we got to watch were on for about 30 minutes each afternoon, and a few hours on Saturday morning.  Except for around Christmas time, of course, when "Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer" was shown approximately eight thousand and four times.

My children also have their very own full blown Pentium computer, which they use to play highly educational games such as "A Licensed Animated Character Learns Math", "A Licensed Animated Character Learns to Read", and their favorite, "A Licensed Animated Character Gets Dad To Buy Licensed Animated Character Merchandise".

I was very fortunate when I was about twelve years old to get a Commodore Vic 20 computer for Christmas.  This awesome machine hooked up to our television, and it stored programs on an ordinary cassette tape.  Playing computer games on the Vic 20 required the following steps:

1. Talk Mom into buying computer magazine with a cool game program listing in it. 
2. Type in the several hundred lines of code making up the cool game program, each line looking something like:
100 DATA "123,412,09876,12876,987987,123987,87875785642387,654"
3. Beat up little sister for unplugging Vic 20 just as you were about to save cool game program. 
4. Re-type several hundred lines of cool game program. 
5. Save Program. 
6. Run Program. 
7. Watch excitedly as nothing at all happens because somewhere in the several hundred lines of code you typed in (twice!) you accidentally typed "O" instead of "0", and so the whole stupid program won't work. 
8. Beat up little sister for no good reason. 
9. Go play with Star Wars action figures. 

Of course, I actually think it's great that I'm able to give my kids things I never even dreamed of at their age.  I just wish Christopher would let his old dad beat him at "Sonic the licensed animated Hedgehog" once in a while.  That's how kids behaved in my day.

Also, we walked thirty miles to school every morning.

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