Krafve My son lives a charmed life.

The other day he confessed that he was concerned he might get to the end of summer and not have enjoyed enough “down time.”

This from the kid who is signed up for football camp, golf camp, a trip to Montana, and a week of Pine Cove.

Down time? Read: time in front of video games.

Yes, his summer schedule is all part of his parents’ strategic plan to keep him away from video games for a couple of months.

Okay, so we may be a little idealistic as parents of a teenage boy.

It seems the whole world is conspiring against us to hook him on gaming — And pretty successfully, too, I might add.

In May, for one of his last PowerPoint assignments of the school year, he carried a load of computer parts to school in a pile stacked in his bare hands.

Apparently, teenage boys have too many things in their backpacks to make room for a collection of computer parts. There was a motherboard, a hard drive, a blah blah blah; whatever those things are.

He walked out the door saying he still needed a “power source,” by which I think he meant a plug in the wall.

The scary thing is he knows what to do to make them all function together.

He has uncles and a brother-in-law who take perverse pleasure in helping him keep ahead of me with technology.

We have piles of junk parts in the living room — the only room in the house where I let him get on the Internet — to prove the men in my family think it is funny to trash my house with gadgets that look like an appliance store explosion.

One friend, a successful mother of three boys and some daughters, told me she keeps a simple rule for when she leaves teenage boys alone in her house: “No guns, no fire, no knives!”

Ah, such wisdom. I made a mental note.

And I told my son not to worry about “down time.”

Cathy Primer Krafve lives and writes with a Texas twang. Visit http://checklistcharlie. blogspot.com or e-mail cathykrafve@gmail. com.