The Phones Are Coming

We ordered smartphones for our daughters this week.

One of them has reached a point where it's impacting her social life because the native language of her friends is now texting and she is out of the loop in being able to coordinate with them outside of school if she wants to.

The other one doesn't actually want one still, but she'll be 18 this year, and we need to get her moving toward adult accessories like a driver's license (which she is dragging her feet on) and a credit card, and the phone fits in with that. Besides, she has had one too many incidents recently where she was supposed to meet us somewhere and botched it, and being able to call her would have been useful.

So we got to 15 and 17 in terms of no cell phones, which in this day and age is fairly unheard of. I still don't plan to get one as long as I can borrow my husband's spare Army phone when I need to. The 12 year old I don't foresee needing one until high school and then we'll see if it's really necessary.

I'm thinking we may be the only parents around handing our teenage daughter a phone with the express purpose of hoping she will text friends on it. It has relatively nothing to do with emergencies or communicating with us in my mind. I just don't want her out of step with her peers if having a cell phone could make high school in any way more bearable as she plods through it on her way toward art school.

While deciding what phones to get, we had an interesting discussion in our kitchen about how they physically feel. I think part of my aversion to cell phones and touch screens in general is I can feel a vague zap under my fingertips when using them. I really don't like it. Turns out my girls experience that same sensation when using touch screens and they don't like it either. My son and my husband feel no such electrical tingling in their fingers when they use them. I wonder what that's about. (It reminds me a little of how back in the days of TVs with cathode ray tubes I could hear one if it was on, even if the volume was off. I hated that sound.)

At some point I will need a cell phone myself, since giving my daughters a way to call me if there is nothing to connect with is silly. I'm hoping to hold out for another year, but it's hard to know. Since apparently in a week or so the majority of people in our house will have cell phones for the first time, and that could change things regardless of what I would prefer.

In any case, this will be an interesting transition. I'm glad my kids have developed skills apart from cell phones over such a long time. I hope they don't get sucked in so far that they become phone zombies like the ones we see all around us everywhere we go. They say they want to actively avoid that, and I believe them. So we'll see.

Bated Breath

All of my kids at some point when they were babies had croup.  Each time it was awful.  Each of them made a trip to the emergency room at Children's Hospital for it.  Each time we were told there really was nothing they could do.  But when your baby struggles with each breath and won't stop crying and coughing it's nightmarish and you just want help.

The thing about those times I remember best was the drive to the hospital with the baby rear facing in the backseat, always in the dark, out of reach.  And I couldn't tell what was worse: Hearing each tortured inhale, or the silence in between breaths.  Each strangled breath was bad, but wondering if something worse had befallen my baby to cause the silence was equally bad.  Times like that when your imagination is spinning out of control and your instincts are hyperactive make for a very long drive (even when it's only 10.7 miles).

We are far from the baby stage now.  Those parenting challenges are hard, and some things do get easier as your kids grow, but somethings don't.