Add Mommy to the Shopping List

I’ve mentioned our Amazon Echo, otherwise known as, “Alexa” here multiple times.   She—I think of it as a she—has grown in popularity as well as usefulness in our home since my husband got her in the early release program.   She plays music, answers questions and manages our shopping list among other things for our family.   Over time, people who come to our house have learned to take advantage of her features from observing how we talk to her.

For example, Edna, who cleans our house knows instead of leaving us a note for supplies she’s run out of, she can just say, “Alexa, add Windex to the shopping list” and the next time she comes back a the Windex will be replenished.   My children have learned to ask Alexa to play all sorts of songs they like.   Recently it was “Cannonball” by Miley Cyrus, currently it’s “Drag Me Down” by One Direction (a favorite of their friend Ryuichi who visited recently).

The latest thing the children have gotten the hang of is using the shopping list.   If they hear me tell them strawberries aren’t available for snack because we ate the last ones at lunch one of the children will pipe up and say, “Alexa, add strawberries to the shopping list.”   From time to time though, Alexa doesn’t understand what we’re asking for when we add something to the list.   Typically, the thing she adds in mistake is funny as it relates in no way to a grocery item.    Today, the children, along with one of our neighbors decided to intentionally add non-grocery items to the list.   They spent about a half-hour talking to Alexa, laughing at her responses and running to find me to tell me what they’d put on our list.  

When I checked later, we had seventy-four items on our shopping list, including:

• Mommy
• worm cake
• Morgan (their sitter)
• fufu zoom
• India
• Seattle city
• underwear
• poop
• refrigerator
• Tesla (personally, I liked this one)
• wasabi
• one hundred toothbrushes
• thunderstorms
• poopie butt
• ghostbusters
• Olivia (their cousin)
• dirty towels

The Big Boy Update:  Our cousin Olivia came over with her parents today to celebrate her birthday with us.   My son was very excited to see her and his aunt and uncle, running around in a manic state, showing off everything.  After saying our hello’s, we sang the birthday song and all joined around the table to have cake and ice cream (although my son had ice cream only, reminding us he doesn’t like icing).  Conversation was happening when suddenly my son said out loud, “who likes ballet?” 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   This morning I asked my daughter if she wanted to watch one of the shows she likes on her iPad.   She said she couldn’t because the app wasn’t working.   Thinking maybe she’d logged out of Netflix I told her I’d be glad to take a look at it and see if I could fix the problem.  Not wanting to relinquish the iPad she’d just been given she replied, “It doesn’t work on Sundays, it works on the other days of the week.”