Mini Techie

There was great excitement in our house with a special delivery recently in the form of a sleek and shiny new iPad, well not exactly new-think the latest one is an iPad 5 or something!-but an iPad 2 is more than good enough for us!!
We got the lovely item in exchange for 150 old phones and ipods that we submitted to Fonebank for a recycling scheme they're currently running in conjunction with Down Syndrome Ireland. The iPad will do wonders to help Mini with her development as there are loads of educational apps out there.We downloaded some already and she loves them! The Lonely Beast and Peekaboo Barn are her firm favourites.

The screen is lovely and big, the colours fantastic and Mini is happily swiping away. Here she is showing how it's done!I love to watch her "at work"!

The scheme is still open so if you know of someone who could benefit from an iPad-or if you just want one yourself!-check out this page on the downsyndrome.ie website.There are a few stipulations-phones older than 10 years are not accepted.Nor are very badly smashed ones-each phone can only be missing 15% of its total parts.Also 80% of them must be in working order.This can be quite hard to verify in old phones that haven't seen the light of day in some time and we actually ended up sending off more than 150 as only 93 of them from the first batch we sent in turned out to be working.

It only took a few months in total to get the required amount-if you think about it, there must be at least one or two old phones in every household in the country. It's a little bit of magic to see these old, useless things turned into something so beneficial!