I remember when my Dad came home with a Commodore 64 computer. It was a BIG deal. It was 1982 and I was 11 years old. My Dad set it up on a big desk downstairs in our basement. He taught me some of the BASIC programming. We played tons of cool games on it. It was exciting. It was my first baby step into the world of computers and I had no clue where it would lead.
When the Internet popped up, I had just graduated from college. So I didn’t have the Internet as a major study tool during my college years. Heck, I didn’t even have a cell phone. I would take a stack of quarters to the pay phone in our hallway when I wanted to call home. By my senior year there were computer labs on campus, but I still used the library for my research projects. We would camp out in study groups and write down information from books and Encyclopedias. It just seems so arduous compared to today where you can sit with a laptop in your dormroom and Google “19th century french women poets” or “biology 101 study guide.”
It’s so wild to think that my children will never know a world without cell phones or computers or the Internet. I try to imagine what THEY will be using as study aids when they are in college. Will there just be ONE small electronic notebook that is their computer, phone, ID, camera, video camera, calendar, etc.?
The coolest gadget in our house right now is the Apple iPAD. I bought it for my hubbie for no real reason except that he REALLY wanted it. And he never really wants anything. Every birthday and every Father’s Day he gets the same expected polo shirt and spa massage. He said he would wait a year for the iPad. He wanted to save up the money. But I knew I had to buy it for him. It would ROCK HIS WORLD.
And I was right!
Plus, he shares the whole iPad experience with our kids. He calls it “The Magic Book.” Bean and Annabel have read The Cat in the Hat, Winnie the Pooh, and Toy Story on The Magic Book. They have played PBS Kids games on it. They have watched videos of themselves. They have experienced a virtual fishing pond.
And it’s just the beginning for them. I guess it’s better to expose them to all this new technology as it happens. I want them to be computer savvy. But I still get stomach knots when I think about them on MySpace, or Facebook, or Twitter, or whatever the social marketing outlet will be when they are teenagers. Then there is cyber bullying and “sexting” and identity theft to worry about.
And I’m sure some people out there will think it’s weird (or perhaps wrong) that I write about my children on this website. It’s a subject that gets talked about A LOT, including here. I do it because I want to remember everything that I experience as a Mom from the exhilarating to the challenging. I want to remember all the pop culture moments that got me excited, made me laugh, or made me sad. This website is my personal diary. It’s part therapy and part virtual scrap book.
I only write down stories and thoughts that I would tell you in person. My husband reads all my entries before I post them. It’s wonderful for me to share moments with my familiy and relatives who don’t live near me. I don’t use curse words and that’s my personal decision.
I write stories about my children so there will be memories for them when they are older. I don’t write anything that might embarrass them and I never post pictures that might make them uncomfortable in 5 or 10 years. My goal is to document everything from the major milestones to those tiny moments. Everything I want to remember. Everything I want to share with my my son and my daughter when they are older.
I want my kiddies to peel through the layers of this website one day so they can learn more about who they were, what they liked, how they changed, how much I loved them. I want them to learn more about ME and who I was, both as their mom and as a person. The thought that they can sit down one day with their own kids and read stories that I wrote is something that makes me happy. It makes me proud. It makes me excited.
I guess, in a way, this mommy blog is MY magic book. And there are so many more magical chapters to come.
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