The Kids Made Me Do It

I blame my children for my recent obsession with technology. Both Dean and I were cell phone hold-outs until about four years ago when we drove to visit Leslie & Ryan in Colorado and Dean's as-yet-to-be-determined gallbladder issues slowed us down. Leslie met us at her front door with “I’ve been worrying for two hours. Where were you? Why don’t you have a cell phone? If you had a cell phone you could have called to tell me you were going to be late. You need a cell phone. When are you going to get a cell phone? ” That “get a cell phone” refrain was repeated off and on until I finally succumbed and joined the cell phone world. But I kept it simple. I did not text or surf the web from my phone. I flipped it up, I dialed, I talked, and I flipped it closed.

If Abby wouldn’t have moved to Ecuador I wouldn’t have felt I needed a Skype phone to keep in touch with her. Skyping from the computer is cool and the video is nice, but to be able to actually hold a phone and walk around or sit on the couch and visit is amazing. Remember the days when nobody called long distance except on Saturday or after 9 p.m. during the week? And it cost about 10 cents a minute – or even more? Now we can call all over the world – for “free.” But after a while, that wasn’t good enough for me and the freedom to Skype her in places other than my house became too tempting to resist. So it’s really Abby’s fault I moved up from the simple flip phone to the iPhone.

The iPhone led to all kinds of other amazing and astonishing technological activities; like entertaining a little boy by playing a movie on the laptop in a car while you’re driving down the Interstate for nine hours.

If you are in a coffee shop and the laptop is unavailable, you can download Bugs Bunny on your iPhone for that little boy … or while waiting for your meal to arrive in a restaurant when you’re too exhausted to entertain him … or even while he rides patiently in the car as you drive 25 minutes from one end of a city to the other in search of Kohls.

And after he’s been dragged from jeans to shirts to shoes inside that Kohls, you can grab that iPhone and take his picture as he finally gets to ride the carousel – while you are also talking to your daughter in Ecuador on Skype on that same iPhone – from the mall!  How cool is that?!

Don't worry, Dad.  Do what the drill seargents say and you'll be escaping soon.

You can even whip out your iPhone and snap a picture of the little guy visiting his Great-Grandpa before he has a chance to escape. 














 
I realized too late that rather than searching for free cartoons for that little boy to watch on the iPhone I could have streamed Netflix shows. So it’s not really my fault that the whole streaming Netflix thing was in my mind when I saw the Best Buy ad in the paper this morning. Hmmmm....those two Best Buy reward coupons are going to expire soon and if I can stream directly to my iPhone why shouldn’t I stream directly to my TV?   I bought a Blue-ray DVD player.
 
 

Don't worry--it was already dead

 
I could say the weather made me do it. Yesterday I was wearing sunscreen and short sleeves and cleaning up flower beds. This morning we woke up to this. What else are you going to do on a depressing, snowy day – in APRIL – besides go shopping? But I don't blame the weather.  And I certainly don't blame myself.  And for once I don't even blame Dean.  I place the blame on my children. Completely.  Before the girls had corrupted me and turned me into a technology monster I might have considered spending the day quilting or baking or reading. 
 
I'm probably still going to spend part of the day reading (on my kindle) and I might bake some cookies to have on hand for whenever the kids drop by (while I listen to Stitcher on my iPhone), and I will definitely be quilting. I’ll just be quilting while I’m watching streaming Netflix shows.◦

The Kids Made Me Do It