Yesterday morning I boarded a flight for my first business trip in more than two-and-a-half years.  And while I was sad to leave my boys behind for a couple of days, there was a certain excitement about the fresh start implicit in this trip.  As I neared the end of the jetway I saw the sun glinting off of the silver body of the airplane, through the dingy window of the jetway, and straight into my eyes.  It seemed fitting for the moment.  I felt bright and shiny.

It made me think about my first flight.  I was eleven years old and we were flying to Southern California to visit my aunt and uncle, go to Disneyland, drive up the coast, and experience the wilds of  the coast.  My excitment for the trip was huge as there were near countless things to look forward to.  But my excitment for the flight was particularly intense.  Most of my friends had flown somehwere before, so there was the eagerness to shed my self-consciousness at not having done.  But in my mind, whether from movies or books or stories from somewhere, flying was a glamorous thing to do.  I wore a dress because I couldn’t stomach the thought of not dressing up for my flight.  And when we reached the gate area I ran into a friend from summer camp, making me feel very worldly, and our parents swapped seats so that she and I could sit together.  It was a big day.

As I made this little trip back in time it dawned on me that none of my sons will have any recollection of their first flight.  IEP and SSP were both roughly 10 weeks old when we flew to visit my parents during my maternity leaves.  JDP was just shy of his second birthday when he flew home from Korea.  They will never remember those moments.  Further, they will never remember a time when boarding a flight was something exciting (the flight itself, that is - not just the destination at the other end).  It made me a little sad.  But then, why should it?

I don’t remember my first ride in a car, and I feel no nostagic hole where that memory should go.  I’m sure that when I was about two days old I was loaded up into a car and driven home from the hospital.  And I’m sure that I’ve ridden in a car nearly every day since.  A car ride doesn’t need to be something exciting for me.  Perhaps the same is true of my kids and air travel.  Perhaps my sense of loss over a memory that will never exist for them is a bit like someone much older feeling regret that I don’t have memories of my first call on a touch-tone phone.  Some things don’t hold the same meaning for one generation as they did for an earlier geneartion.

When you get down to it I think the thing that matters is not the excitement for boarding a plane.  What matters is the excitement at a big moment in your life.  For me, because I was old enough to have built up a great amount of anticipation around that flight it was a big moment.  This morning, because I’m excited about my new job and the opportunity it holds, my first trip with this company was a big moment.  As long as my kids still get excited about big moments – anticipate them, relish in them, and never take them for granted –  then I think we’re probably doing okay.  For me, my first flight was a big moment.  For them it wasn’t.  But something else will be.

This is the letter I just wrote to my congressman and senators.  Please feel free to copy, paste, and use it to write to yours.  You can find your representative’s website and contact form here.  You can find your senators’ websites and contact forms here.

Dear Mr. _______,

I am not unique. And that is exactly why I am important.

I am one of millions of American parents who want stricter gun laws. I want for my children to go to movies, and shop for Christmas presents, and attend school without the risk of being mowed down by semi-automatic gunfire. I want to kiss them goodbye in the morning without fearing it will be for the last time. I want to raise them in a society that protects their rights more fiercely than the rights of those who might harm them.

There is no excuse for this kind of carnage. No amendment is worth this price. I am heartbroken, but I am also ashamed. And until our government can fix this hideous and inexcusable crisis, we should all carry our shame with our grief.

I beg of you to work with your fellow Congressmen and Congresswomen to take up the mantle of gun control, and not rest until it is resolved.

Very sincerely,
Gale P.

When we are being honest we will admit that our culture isn’t perfect.  This is true of every culture on the planet.  We all have our strengths, but we also have our weaknesses.  And unless we are willing to cop to those weaknesses, they will continue to plague us.  I started thinking about this yesterday after listening to this piece on Morning Edition about Eastern vs. Western perspectives on struggle.

The piece begins with a poignant description of a fourth grade classroom in Japan.  As the children are being taught to draw three-dimensional cubes on two-dimensional paper it is the child who is having the most trouble with the lesson who is selected to do his work on the board.  Reporter Alix Spiegel aptly notes that in the U.S. this would be considered cruel and unusual.  We would never want to publicly humiliate a child by announcing his failure to grasp the material.

In the Japanese classroom, though, the reaction is vastly different.  As the child fails to get it right and repeatedly keeps trying, the other students patiently wait (apparently without any kind of teasing or mockery – that alone impressed me a great deal) until he finally mastered the cube, at which point his fellow students broke out into applause.  In Eastern cultures this kind of struggle is part and parcel of the learning process; something to be embraced and conquered rather than a source of shame or inadequacy.

My children are growing up smack dab in the middle of America.  We’re doing our best to expose our kids to a variety of cultures, and to help them understand at a core level that there are lots of different approaches to life.  The fact remains, though, that in this part of the country long-standing cultural norms are strong and not often diluted by influences from other cultures.  We will have to work hard to infiltrate those norms with awareness of different paths.  This may be easy enough when another culture’s way of doing something is more fun or interesting.  But getting kids to sign up for more struggle is going to be a tough sell.

Already IEP is reluctant to keep after something that he finds tricky.  When a sweater sleeve gets turned wrong-side out he comes to me to right it.  When he gets to the final few bites of oatmeal in the bottom of the bowl he asks for help in scooping them out.  And far too often (work- and school-day mornings do not lend themselves to embracing struggle…) I oblige him.  There are times, though, when I decline.  When he can’t find a puzzle piece and wants me to help him look.  When he turns a backwards shirt around on his own because I’m in the shower.  When he cuts his food with the side of his fork because I’m busy feeding his brother.  And in these situations, when he figures it out for himself, his pride and satisfaction are palpable.

I try in these moments to point out to him how capable he is, and how good it feels to do something successfully even though it was hard.  I think I need to step back even further, though.  Explaining to a four-year-old in abstract terms that “Isn’t it nice to have a genuine sense of accomplishment?” won’t get us to a place where he fully embraces struggle as a part of learning.  We are all steeped in the belief that it is superior to find things easy in the first place, rather than to conquer things that are hard.  Overcoming that belief will require us all to experience firsthand the value of the struggle.

Struggle is uncomfortable for most of us.  We don’t see it as the springboard to accomplishment.  But perhaps with time - and some struggle itself – we can.

SSP turned eleven months old last week.  And he’s dangerously close to becoming a toddler.

Watching him transition out of babyhood is harder this time around because I know we will never have another baby.  All of these wonderful things that babies do at this age are passing through our lives for the last time.  The quintessential baby crawls.  The grasping for Cheerios and missing.  The coos and the babbling.  The frenetic flailing of arms when he gets excited.  The “boops” to noses and cheeks.  The curling up on a Boppy pillow to nurse before bedtime.  We will never be here again.

Lately I find myself taken aback almost daily.  SSP is shedding his infancy faster than I like to admit.  He’s starting to take steps while holding onto our fingers.  He stands for seconds at a time before he realizes he’s not holding on to anything.  He can follow simple instructions like “wave” or “put your feet down” or “don’t touch that.”  And I can tell that his little baby babbles are in their final throes, on the cusp of turning into actual words.

When IEP turned eleven months old I was mostly sad at the premise of weaning him.  But this time it is so much bigger.  I feel like I’m weaning myself now, saying goodbye to this phase of my children’s lives for the last time.  Of course I know that there are wonderful things on the horizon: first words and hugs and kisses; silly games in the bathtub and countless bedtime stories; funny observations and increased amazement at the world around him.

And I can’t wait for all of those things.  But they won’t stop me from missing the days when I walked into a room and SSP would crawl all the way across it in five seconds, perch on his knees at my feet, and stretch his arms up to me until I bent over to scoop him into mine.  Because right now there are few things I love as much.

Today is IEP’s last day of freedom.

I make it sound so foreboding, don’t I?  I don’t mean to.  Honestly, I shouldn’t.  The thing that awaits him tomorrow?  It’s his first day of school, which, when you get right down to it is one of the most wonderful things that will ever happen to him.  It will open the doors to learning and friendships and adventures of all stripes.  Truly, I am excited for him.  He is excited.  We are all excited.

With each rite of passage, though, we leave something behind.  In this case it’s the very last vestige of his babyhood, and that (at least for me) is not without some sadness.  No longer will he play in his pajamas while I get ready for work.  No longer will he get to look at Nanny when she arrives and proclaim, “I want to go to the Science Center today,” (as he did just yesterday).  And most of all, no longer will each day be his blank slate to fill with nearly anything of his choosing.  It is the end of something.

It is also the beginning of something.  Starting school is a happy occasion.  It is also a privilege.  But there will likely come a day when it will be a chore; when IEP will long to stay home in his pajamas doing the 7th grade equivalent of spending the morning playing with his toy trains.  When that day does come I will think back on this time in his life, on how unencumbered it was by responsibility or obligation.  And perhaps there will be a day here and there when I indulge him.  Perhaps there will be a day here and there when I try to recreate for him the joys and freedoms of being three years old.

This morning was like most others.  There was breakfast in the sunroom.  There was a long walk with the boys in the double jogger and the dogs on either side.  There was the instruction that it is IEP’s “very important job” to make sure that his bed is made and that he is dressed before Nanny gets here.  It’s a routine we’ve been practicing for weeks in preparation for this very moment.  We are ready.  But even though we’re ready – or more adroitly, even though he is ready – I am not entirely ready.  That, though, is the tricky, slippery, unwieldy thing about raising kids.  They continue growing up whether we’re ready or not.  I’m still a relatively green parent, but I’d be willing to wager that I’ll never be entirely ready, and that each new phase will come accompanied by a silent internal chorus of, “But I’m not ready yet!”  I will sing the chorus to myself over and over and over, and it won’t change a thing.

IEP hasn’t been a baby for some time now.  Starting tomorrow I won’t be able to fool even myself anymore.

IEP, nine months old

My baby hit double digits recently.  He’s now ten months old.  A strange milestone, perhaps (past nine months, but not yet a year), but one that resonates with me.

When IEP turned 10 months it was right after my birthday, and just before my sister’s one year anniversary.  I spent that day filled with memories of what my life had been like one year prior – 7 months pregnant, having a low-key Chinese dinner with GAP to celebrate my birthday, and being the sole bridesmaid in my sister’s beautiful wedding.  I was struck by how vastly different my life had become in the course of a year.

Now SSP has crossed that threshold and again I am haunted by a certain nostalgia, although of a slightly different nature.

Yes, I have paused to reflect on how much things have changed in a year – we just returned from the same Colorado vacation that we took last year and this time I carried SSP in a backpack for the exact same hike on which last summer I carried him inside me.  But more than that I am struck by how I am walking back through the tracks I created three years ago.  Two boys.  Both autumn babies.  Hitting the same milestones at the same times of year.

SSP, nine months old

SSP wears the same pajamas that his brother wore.  He sleeps in the same position.  He plays the same games and does the same baby tricks.  His birthday is three weeks earlier in the year than his brother’s, so his milestones sometime sneak up on me.  I catch myself thinking, “You’re not supposed to do that until next month.”  But he does them in his own time, just like IEP did.  I shouldn’t be surprised, though, because I’ve learned by now that all these things repeat themselves.

Still, sometimes the symmetry of it all is just too much to bear.

Eagerly waiting for the 'L'

We needed to get the heck out of Dodge.  It’s been a thousand degrees for the past month, and we hadn’t been out of town since our trip to Disney World in May.  We were all going a wee bit crazy.  So this past weekend the Griswolds Family P loaded up into the car and drove to Chicago for a long weekend.  We covered a lot of ground in 48 hours, including Millennium Park, Taste of Chicago, the Field Museum, a Cubs game, and the Shedd Aquarium.  It was a wonderful change of scenery and provided a much-needed break from our usual weekend fare.  But amidst all our activities, my mind swirled with thoughts of our adoption process.

How will you spend quality time with your children? This was one of the questions on the 20+ page Personal Data Form that GAP and I each had to fill out as part of our never-ending adoption paperwork.  It was a question that ran through my mind this past weekend because the weekend we had was a perfect embodiment of the answer I gave.  My answer was,

Particularly in young children I believe that quantity begets quality.  You can’t ask a three- or four-year-old to just “turn it on” and have quality time RIGHT NOW.  You have to spend a lot of time with them and some of it will end up being really quality time.  You can’t always plan it, though.  A special occasion could be completely lost on them.  And a silly game in the bath one evening could end up being the most fun you’ve had with your kid in days.

In that vein… Saturday was a big day.  We kicked it off at the Field Museum, then went uptown for the Cubs game.  On the way back to our hotel we inadvertently got off the ’L’ at least a couple of stops too early and ended up making a rather long foot trek home.  Halfway through that long walk it started to rain.  The early sprinkles quickly gave way to heavy, legitimate rain, and by the time we got back to our Chicago digs we were completely soaked through to the skin.  At one point during our walk, as it became clear that there was no alternative to “completely soaked” I started laughing out loud.  From his perch on GAP’s shoulders IEP looked down at me and asked, “Mommy, why you laughing?”  “Because it’s just funny, buddy,” I told him.  “We are so wet that it’s funny.”  Then he started laughing at my laughter, and I in turn laughed at his laughter.  There was nothing to do but laugh.

Back at the hotel, dried off and with naps under our belts we began mobilizing to head out for dinner.  As IEP rubbed the sleep out of his eyes he curled up against me and I asked him what had been his favorite part of the day had been.  He didn’t have to think before he answered, “Riding the ‘L’ and laughing at the rain.”

I smiled.  On a day that included one of the foremost natural history museums in the world, and one of the most storied baseball teams of all time, the things that mattered the most to my son were a ride on a train and the misadventure of getting wet.  I couldn’t help but think of my adoption questionnaire.  I have some firm ideas about parenting, but many of them are just ideas.  Many of them have yet to be borne out by experience.  So it made me happy to hear that, in his infinite three-year-old wisdom, my son had confirmed my hypothesis.*  We had quality time, but it wasn’t the quality time I had planned.  It was the quality time that grew organically out of a long day spent together.

I think I find this parenting truth comforting.  I supposed it could be frustrating to know that extensive plans for special occasions may be wasted on a young kid who doesn’t understand their significance.  But what I find comforting is that what matters most to a child is that which is genuine.  A shared moment.  An unexpected laugh.  An unplanned memory.  Museums and baseball games are wonderful outings.  But what matters most is that we were there together.  Having an experience together.  Laughing at the rain together.

*A sample size of one incident is statistically significant, right?

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PS – Our adoption home study is tonight.  I am currently accepting prayers, good vibes, happy thoughts, and whatever other virtual talismans of good luck you might want to send our way.

I mentioned in Tuesday’s post that I’m reading Bringing Up Bebe by Pamela Druckerman, and that I’m really enjoying it.  It is the part-memoir/part-parenting book written in response to her experience raising small children in Paris.  She is a charming writer and even when I disagree with her position her humor and wit still make it a fun read.  That said, in spite of being a quick and easy book it’s given me a lot to think about.

Amidst Druckerman’s evaluations of how we feed, socialize, and care for our children I’ve been prompted to consider and question some of the key tenets of both French and American cultures.  There is a line in the 1995 remake of the movie Sabrina in which a glamorous Julia Ormand explains to a stuffy Harrison Ford that French culture is all about pleasure.  And she’s right.  When it comes to savoring life I’m not sure anyone does it better than the French.  (Although the Italians might give them a run for their money.)  America, on the other hand, is all about achievement, and Druckerman crystallizes that stance when she quotes a Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget.

Druckerman researches various parenting philosophies as she tries to pin down exactly which discrete components add up to “French parenting.”  In her investigation of French parenting she tells how Piaget came to the States in the 1960s to share his theories on child development.  As he explains the various developmental stages through which all children must go apparently nearly all American parents ask some version of what he calls “The American Question” because it was asked ad nauseum by American parents.  That question was, “How can we speed up our child’s progression through these steps?”

Druckerman writes,

The American Question sums up an essential difference between French and American parents.  We American assign ourselves the job of pushing, stimulating, and carrying our kids from one developmental stage to the next.  The better we are at parenting, we think, the faster our kids will develop.  …

French parents just don’t seem so anxious for their kids to get head starts.  They don’t push them to read, swim, or do math ahead of schedule.  They aren’t trying to prod them into becoming prodigies.  I don’t get the feeling that – surreptitiously or otherwise – we’re all in a race for some unnamed prize.

This isn’t to say that the French are a bunch of louts.  Sure they can only claim 64 Nobel laureates to America’s 331.  But when you normalize those tallies by population (roughly 65 million for France and 313 million for the U.S.) each country has earned about one Nobel prize per million people.  And this doesn’t even begin to count the contribution of French art, music, literature, and food to the modern international cultural landscape.  No, they didn’t invent the cotton gin or the iPad, but  they seem to have discovered that more factors into a worthwhile life than mere commercial success.

I must admit, there’s something about the French approach to child rearing that really appeals to me.  Perhaps it’s just that Americans’ “concerted cultivation” can be exhausting (it can), but I also wonder if, at some level, the French way isn’t just a better way to raise kids.  When you get right down to it, most of us don’t grow up to be Condoleezza Rice or Bill Gates.  Most of us grow up to lead lives that are invaluable to ourselves and those in our immediate circles, but which would be considered unremarkable when evaluated at a global level.  Given that, would we not be better off learning from the very beginning how to live life in a way that maximizes enjoyment, rather than accomplishment?

Nevertheless, despite all of my misgivings about middle-class American parenting practices, I am American and I abide by many of them.  I still want my kids to hit their milestones at least on time, if not early.  And I want to see signs of their talents and intelligence even as they are tiny little youngsters.  But before my American-ness gets the better of me I make a point to remember an interview I heard with Malcolm Gladwell on NPR a couple of years ago.  He commented that when you meet someone as an adult, no one cares at what age they learned to talk or to read or memorized their multiplication tables.  Once we reach adulthood it matters that we can do these things, but not when we first learned.  So if that’s the case, what’s the rush?

I was proud of myself.  And then I was ashamed of myself for being proud of myself.  You see, the very thing of which I was so proud was something over which I had no control – a complete coincidence, to be sure.  No one deserves to be proud of themselves for something they didn’t do on purpose – like being tall, or not needing glasses.

Why was I proud?  I had just dropped off a couple hundred ounces of frozen breast milk packed in dry ice at a UPS distribution center for overnight delivery to a milk bank in Indiana.

Why was I ashamed?  Because given the circumstances donating the milk was the only decent thing to do.  It wasn’t heroic.  It was the very least I could do.  Anything else would have been borderline despicable.  So being proud of myself for donating it felt awfully self-serving.

What are the circumstances I refer to?  Well, the fact that I had a few hundred ounces of frozen breast milk to give in the first place.  For reasons that are unknown to me and completely out of my control, I produce a lot of milk.  (I joke that I’m part Holstein.)  It was this way when IEP was a baby, and now with SSP we’re right back there.  I make more milk than any one baby needs and it piles up in our freezer.  When this happens I have two choices – let it go to waste, or ship it off to a milk bank for babies who need it.  Seriously, there’s only one right answer here.

As I got to thinking about this I was reminded of a passage in the book I’m currently reading, Bringing Up Bebe by Pamela Druckerman.  It’s a charming and insightful book; one that I’m quite glad my mother pushed on me.  Amidst the author’s commentary about all that American parents do wrong she does call out the French for quite shamelessly ignoring the benefits of breast milk.  As a culture they turn, almost unilaterally, to formula.  It was one of the few parenting decisions she made that ran counter to her fellow Parisians.  However, in her discussion of this topic she also calls out American mothers for turning nursing into a competition.  She writes:

After the baby is born, the first obvious difference between French and American moms is breastfeeding.  For us Anglophone mothers, the length of time that we breast-feed – like the size of a Wall Street bonus – is a measure of performance.  One former businesswoman in my Anglophone playgroup regularly sidles up to me and asks, faux innocently, “Oh, are you still nursing?”

It’s faux because we all know that our breastfeeding “number” is a concrete way to compete with one another.  A mother’s score is reduced if she mixes in formula, relies too heavily on a breast-milk pump, or actually breast-feeds for too long (at which point she starts to seem like a crazed hippie.)

In middle-class circles in the United States, many mothers treat infant formula as practically a form of child abuse. The fact that breast-feeding requires endurance, inconvenience, and in some cases physical suffering only increases its status.

It is a passage that stuck with me.  Reading it made me realize afresh how absolutely ridiculous it is to associate any amount of status with nursing.  Yes, I’m all for promoting the health benefits to both the mother and baby.  I’m all for eliminating any negative stigmas attached to nursing.  And I would certainly advocate for anyone who has the ability to nurse her baby for at least six months (and up to a year if possible) to do so.  Nevertheless, many of the circumstances that add up to that kind of success are often out of our control.  A woman’s milk supply can be affected by her diet, level of hydration, and how frequently she nurses or pumps.  But by and large it’s a part of her biology that was determined long ago and in which she had no hand.  The second major factor in successful nursing is the ability to nurse regularly.  Granted pumping greatly increases the freedom and flexibility that a nursing mother has.  Nevertheless, many working women have jobs that don’t afford them the opportunity to stop working for 20 to 30 minutes every three hours so they can pump.

Some women do deserve to be proud for going the distance with nursing.  Women who struggle with supply and pump between feedings just to produce enough milk for the baby to thrive.  Women who battle thrush, and mastitis, and clogged ducts.  Women whose jobs are not at all conducive to pumping and who finagle a way to make it work in spite of crappy logistics.  These women should be proud of what they’ve accomplished if they manage to nurse their babies for longer periods of time because they’ve overcome some major obstacles to do so.  (Which isn’t at all to say that they should be ashamed if they switch to formula instead of doing battle with their breasts each day.  These are highly personal decisions.)

As for me, I am lucky.  I have a good milk supply and a desk job with an office door that locks.  Given this stacked deck nearly any woman could easily nurse her baby to a year.  But the fact remains that not all women are dealt this hand.  And every time we judge or condemn a woman who weans her baby earlier than that we undermine the community and fellowship that all mothers should share.

For a woman in my position, donating the milk was the only decent thing to do.  Being proud of it would be like being proud that my kids are up to date on their shots; or being proud that I gave a seat on a bus to a 95-year-old woman.  When it’s the only reasonable option it’s nothing to be proud of.

“Please tell me about I am a little baby.”

Translation, “Please can we talk about when I was a baby.”

It’s one of IEP’s favorite requests these days.  Now that he has a baby brother and a sense of how different babies are from kids, he finds it really interesting to hear about all the things he did when he was a baby.  Partly because I enjoy the trip down memory lane, and partly because I think it’s good for his library of memories, I indulge him.  Also, I was the same way as a kid.  I loved hearing about myself as a tiny tot.

The other thing I loved being told about?  The olden days.  ”Mom, tell us about the olden days!” my sister and I would plead.  This meant, essentially, “Tell us about growing up in a small town in the 1950s so that we can marvel at how arcane life was back then.”  And, probably for the same reasons, she also indulged us.

She told us how her family’s home phone number was only four digits long, and her grandmother’s was only two digits.  She told us that when her mother was pregnant with her and ready to deliver she just got up and walked across the street to the hospital.  She told us about writing counter checks at the Tastee Freeze after school and dragging Main Street on weekend nights in high school.  And she told us about when she worked as a teller at the family’s bank one summer in college a bird got into the building and she was the only one able to shoot it down. …  No answering machines.  No microwaves.  No VCRs.  No cassettes or CDs.  No car phones.

I remember thinking, “Whew.  I’m glad that I’m growing up in the 80s when things are so advanced.  This way my kids won’t think I grew up in the dark ages.”  Clearly 13-year-old Gale had no idea what was coming.

It amazes me to think about this sometimes – how vastly different life is today with the technological advances of the past 20 years.  My children will never know life without cell phones.  Further, they will never no life without iPhones.  They will never know life without the internet and all that entails – e-mail, social networking, instant answers to random questions, etc.  They will never replace a scratched CD.  They will never go to Blockbuster to rent a movie.  They will never know what it is to rewind a tape.

One of these days my kids will be old enough to realize that things were not like this when I was a kid.  They’re going to ask me to tell them about the olden days.  They may not call it that, but that’s what they will mean.  I imagine that probably within the next five years, and certainly within the next 10, I will have to answer some collection of the following questions.

1. How did you look up movie times? (In the newspaper.  You only threw them out once a week.)
2. How did you record a show?  (You scrambled to find a blank VHS tape, or something you didn’t care about taping over.)
3. You didn’t have Tivo?  (No.)
4. What did you do if you missed something on TV?  (You just missed it.)
5. What did you do during commercials?  (We watched them.)
6. How did you make plans with your friends?  (You called their house.)
7. What did you do if they weren’t home?  (You left a message with someone else at the house.)
8. How did you do research for school papers?  (Went to the library or used an encyclopedia.)
9. What’s an encyclopedia?  (It’s what Wikipedia would be if it were printed out into about 30 books.)
10. How did you listen to music?  (We made mix tapes.)
11. How did you order things?  (You called a catalog.)

It’s amusing to think about, but I also puzzle over the significance of my life having bridged the gap between the pre- and post-internet worlds.  I think it must be akin to being born in 1890 and Ford Motor Company launching the Model T when you were 18 years old.  I think the change is that seismic.

My kids are absolutely going to think I grew up in the dark ages.  And by today’s standards, they will be right.  But in some ways, I look  forward to their jaws dropping when I tell them that you used to have to look up directions before you left the house, and car phones were mounted to your dashboard.  I think it will be good for them to understand a different way of life, if only academically.

But also, I think I will enjoy the trip down memory lane.  It’s not that I think the older ways were better.  (Life with the internet is far superior to life without it in many ways.)  But I like thinking back on the simplicity of childhood.  Yes, the simplicity of childhood is amplified by the simplicity of less technology.  But life for a child is usually simpler than life for an adult in any era.  As adults we tend to complicate things unnecessarily.  Stopping to remember that things can almost always be simpler is a good exercise for all of us.