“Mom, I hate your stupid blog.” -Admire the honesty of that statement!

“There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.”

~Colin Powell

Last night was an interesting evening in our home. During last night’s family meal I brought up the NY-Times article; “Digital Age Is Slow to Arrive in Rural America” which talked about how entire counties in rural America do not have broadband and my comment on that article was ‘while Rural America is worrying about what their kids are missing by NOT having internet, I am worrying about what my kids are missing by spending too much time on the internet.’ -This annoyed my children. I also mentioned the other article I linked in yesterdays blog (about the over-connectivity of the deployed military) I explained that I found the juxtaposition of the two articles very interesting and asked the family what they thought about people in America not being able to get internet and the fact that  military in combat, in the middle of the desert, had constant contact. Well the discussion was very telling, most had very little to say, but they communicated with their bodies and the messages they were sending were received loud and clear. All three of my children said ‘they hated the discussion because it was like a debate, they don’t like debates and further more they hated my blog and did not want to discuss it anymore!’

WOW, I was excited that they had such strong feelings about all of it so I asked why they hated the blog and they all said that they thought I was writing negative things about them, which I said was not true, but I thought about it anyway, and decided that maybe I am being too negative, but that is certainly not my intention. So just to set the record straight: I absolutely love my children and I believe that they are all wholly amazing, each in his and her own ways. I tried to explain to them that the blog is more about parenting in an age of hyper-connectivity, which is frightening because it is like nothing ever experienced before. That the blog is about concern, shared experience and support for people with similar struggles. I told them that I worried about their future ability to strike up a conversation with someone they just met, and about the diversity of topics that they could potentially learn about  and expose themselves to by participating in these conversations rather than getting up and saying they were bored; maybe just give listening a chance. Then I spoke about the oldest language there is; body language, I told them that although they were not saying much verbally they were communicating in a way that was just as important. My 13 year old daughter had her arms crossed across her chest and her knees pulled into her chest while sitting in a dining chair, her twin brother had his head down on the table and was mumbling that he,”didn’t care about the stupid (fill in the blank with any topic)”, my 11 year old was bouncing and flailing around in her seat  so much that it  almost looked like she was having convulsions, while she repeated for the thousandth time that she was bored.

The exchange I was hoping for did happen eventually, and it was a good one; we talked about my idea to start a local teen book club and from there the topic went to the style of writing that each of us preferred and our favorite authors. I honestly feel that, as we prepare for our 5th Tech-Free Sunday,  the change in our home is producing extraordinary results, even if the kids don’t see it, or appreciate it. Tech-Free Sundays force each of us to be fully present in each and every moment of that day, without distraction and this is spilling over into other days of the week with a new awareness of how disconnected we had become from one another while becoming over-connected in the cyber-world. This blog is taking up a good portion of my time, but I am trying to do after my kids go to bed so that I don’t cut my nose off to spite my face. I have come to realize that as we “LOG OUT” on Sunday’s I am now spending more time on the internet than I was before; doing research, or reading more about other people’s experiences for this blog, which is also helping me to grow as a parent and a person, and to become a better communicator, which includes more listening and observing than it does talking.

I’d like to share a blog post with you, which I shared with my son tonight when he told me that he thought he wasn’t going to make the cut on the middle school baseball team. The blog is called “The Musings of a Middle School Art Teacher” and the title of the post was Four Rules of Failure Her post begins with these words: “I am a huge fan of failure.  I believe there’s no better instructional tool than a solid F.” I read that and had to see where she was going with it, well after reading it I must confess that my pride about saving the day by downloading the Kindle Reader to help my daughter complete her book report was a mistake on my part, I should have let her fail. The author is absolutely right: failure IS one of the greatest teaching tools, and as parents we try to protect our children from failure, we want them to succeed and we do everything we can to help them, but I failed to remember that failing is the most important part of succeeding. So I mentioned our bread baking failure to my son and asked him if it had changed him in any way. He said of course it had, he’ll always double check at what temperature something should be cooked, and I know that the more experience he has he will learn that 95% of anything that is baked is at 350 plus or minus 25 degrees, but he doesn’t know that yet.…The point is; he did learn something from that failure, which in itself is a success!

onward we march towards another day, just slightly more enlightened than the day before, and so the day ends successfully especially if it included some failure….

Chalk one up for the advancement of technology… the digital book.

I often find myself marveling at the technological wonders at our fingertips – some we know about and others that are a bit harder to grasp – even though this blog focuses on the negative impact that technology overload that can have on a family’s quality time, human interaction, and the under-development of social graces in general. The over-use of the text feature on a cell phone is a prime example. While I do often curse Alexander Graham Bell for my inability to be unavailable when I choose to be, if he didn’t invent the telephone someone else would have – someone who had saddle-sores from delivering the US Mail or blisters on his fingertips from incessant pecking on the telegraph.

That said, I smile as I write this because the truth is that I DID download the C25K Pro (couch to 5k) app to my Droid the other night at 2 am to get my family on the road to fitness while still being able to hold their precious iPod Touches (although they shouldn’t be able to text and run at the same time -I hope!?). (On yet another personal note: I have the lowly iPod Nano which is why I must rely on my ‘smart’ phone to allow me to be “app” ready). AND, forgive me father for I have sinned and it has been _____ days since my last confession; yesterday on my way home from the office I was talking on mobile speaker phone when I was totally busted by the person I was conversing with who said, “Are you talking, AND texting, AND driving at the same time???” I could have lied, but instead I said, “ummmm, what makes you say that?” and she said, “I can hear you hitting the keys.” YIKES…. well there was a soccer practice/equipment emergency, but there really is no excuse for that and so I will not even try; it is dangerous and I should not have done it. So let me segue (not very gracefully) into the point of this post.

I absolutely LOVE books and despite that I recently allowed my daughter to download the Kindle Reader app to her iPod Touch. Now, if you had asked me before this particular ‘book emergency’ (more about that in a sec) if I would ever tout the use of a digital-book-type format I would have told you ‘where to go’, because I happen to be a very tactile person. I like to touch and hold things, sometimes (brace yourselves) I like to write in the margins (New Husband was mortified to discover this), and I like to buy things ( 🙂 ).

I’m going to ramble off the path here (again) for a moment; New Husband is a ‘library guy. He works at a university and if there is a book he wants to read he will get that book come hell or high water for free (his favorite four letter ‘F’ word) and will send it back when he is finished. I, on the other hand, like to own my books, I like to love my books, and I also do not like thinking about all of the other nose-picking people who have touched the pages of the library book before I have. So I would spend every last penny on a  book if it was one I really wanted to read. That said, I was not a fan of the Kindle or the Nook (or the like) UNTIL  it snowed. Those of you reading from the North or places elsewhere where snow is an issue will laugh at this: It snowed about 8 inches and our entire county shut down – the public library and schools were closed and a telephone call to our local book store went unanswered forcing us to assume that it too was closed. Well, this is the day my daughter  declares that she has a book report due tomorrow. (Now mind you, not only are we dealing with the fact that the child has a report due TOMORROW and she does not yet have the book in her possession let alone read it, we are faced with a southern weather catastrophe many people call snow)…. So who comes to the rescue? New Technology! (and New Husband and his knowledge of said “app” -he said he didn’t get enough props in TFS #4 -Fajita post -LOL)

Seriously though, he reduced my daughters anxiety level from a ten to a zero, and mine from ten to an eight (the book still had to be read, and the report done). So he got the ‘app’ downloaded on her iPod Touch, and then we purchased “Dicey’s Song” from Amazon so that she could read the book and get the report done in less than 24 hours. Although, I was NOT happy with her poor planning or the fact that her poor planning had become my emergency, I was extremely grateful and ‘wowed’ by the technology available to aide her in getting her report done on time. I will say this, IF you are a parent who is forced into this same type of last minute book report emergency, you should know that the Kindle App does more work than it should; it offered themes, etc., almost rewarding my little scholar for being ‘last minute Sally’, so I doubt very much that she read the entire book on on her iPod. Instead she used the high-tech version of the ole “Cliff’s Notes” to get her report done, and of that I am not a fan, but I was glad that she completed the report on time by ‘reading’ the ‘book’ with the help of a technology, something I’m sure old A. G. Bell could not have fathomed either. So, chalk one up for the digital revolution!