I bought it on Ebay...or did I?

Last night as I was sitting watching television my husband looks up from his computer and asks me, "did you purchase something on Ebay?" I think for a moment and answer, "not that I am a aware of." He checks again and asks, "you didn't purchase a Jumpstart Advanced Preschool game" and we both get nervous at that point realizing what probably happened. "No, I would not have purchased the preschool game, Gess played with that years ago, and she is way too advanced for that now." We both start trying to figure out exactly how this all went down when he tells me, "Well we are currently the high bidder and the maximum we are willing to pay is $68.00!!" The current bid was only $5.51 with 17 minutes left to go and we were really hoping that no one took the bid any higher.

So here is the deal, my daughter has been using the computer for several years and she is really good at it. She used to have her own user, well she still does, but when I reinstalled this last time I just let her use mine whenever she wanted. After all, she did not seem to get into files and things she was not supposed to anymore. Well, she has learned to spell this year and she types pretty good too. Because of all that she has gotten rather good at surfing the net. This has been a problem from time to time for instance when she gets to Youtube to see a Madagascar video and ends up clicking videos that are not so grand. Still, all in all, it's been pretty safe. Besides Madagascar (which she can accurately spell) she also likes to go to JumpStart.com and play Jump Start world (we are subscribers). We do not have a link to it saved anywhere because she is good at getting there herself. Well it appears that by typing Jump Start into the browser she also managed to find her way to Ebay which was selling the game.

As I went over to my computer and looked at my history, sure enough, Gess had been there and bid on the game. I save all my usernames and passwords on my local machine and I even get annoyed if a site does not remembered them, so logging into our Ebay account was easy enough for her. How or why she typed in $68 I will never understand though. But she obviously clicked through all the right steps and behold, we were the new high bidders on Ebay! We eventually won the bid and did our duty and paid for my daughter's purchase and our very cheap mistake!



We are grateful for a few things, one is that we did not have to spend more than $6 to learn this lesson and two that the seller had great feedback and even offered free shipping for the product! We were also grateful that this is actually an excellent video game. While Gess used to have the game and is way too advanced to bother with it now, we will be glad to find someone else who can use it knowing they are getting a really good product.

The Jump Start games from Knowledge Adventure are, in my opinion, the best educational games out there. Gess had a Jumpstart Preschool game that really helped teach her to use the computer as well as learn her colors, numbers, and letters. She got Jump Start Kindergarten a few years back and we got her Jump Start World for her 6th birthday. She completed that and now she is part of the Jump Start World community that has games for even higher levels. The only problem with Jump Start World is that only works on Windows, which is what she was using when all this happened. However, all the other Jump Start games install great on Linux and we are hopeful to find a fix for Jump Start World on Linux someday soon.

Anyway, we learned our lesson. Do not save your passwords if you let your child on your user, no matter how good you think they may be with it! I guess I will be spending today making my daughter her own user on both Windows and Linux. Like I said though, we are counting our blessings. It could have been a lot more expensive and we could have ended up buying something a lot worse!