Why is it unthinkable? Absolutely nothing wrong with paying off debts (and if you believe in that sort of thing perhaps it's what you were "meant" to do if the numbers lined up xD).
Hopefully you'll be able to get that iPad Pro soon :)
And yay for it clicking with the wife! Be cool if she starts using her account, better now than never right ;D
The reality is that for your average person out there, cryptocurrencies still seem like a scam, or fake, or a pipe dream. But as I demonstrated to my wife this week, a person can turn a $2000 credit card debt into a $0 credit card debt by creating little pieces of content on the Steem blockchain. That's very real. That's a very real outcome.
I had a similar thing with JJ, he didn't really care about me playing around with magical internet money because I wasn't "wasting" "real" money on it, and would sometimes be amused when I would tell him the estimated usd values of my wallet as prices went up and down. What made it real for him was when I bought him some Magic cards from 
I'm converting all my steem to hive but at this stage I'm probably going to do the same thing as you and cash out the kids' steem to their bank accounts. I was going to increase their hive holdings as well but then decided to show them what can be done if they kept at it.
Their hive holdings meanwhile are getting increased super slowly by trailing my votes, which I probably should have done with their steem accounts too but I didn't think about it at the time x_x
RE: I did the unthinkable