The Modern Family?
This weekend has been a weekend of recovery for me – mentally and physically. I’ve been recovering from the stress of three tough weeks in a contract deployment environment and recovering physically by getting back in the groove with my put on hold exercise program. At my age, the mental recovery is so much easier than the physical recovery!
But I wanted to give you just a quick taste of our weekend family life – maybe the modern family? This evening, my wife and I were sitting in our room on our lounge chairs watching the Coca-Cola 600 NASCAR race – or I was watching the race – she was doing crossword puzzles. We both had our legs up after a day of exercise, chores, and church and we just settled in for a bit of rest and relaxation.
As my wife worked on her crossword puzzle, she appears stumped by one particular clue and she reached down and grabbed her phone. The text exchange between my wife and my 14 year old daughter who was just upstairs in the loft went something like this:
My wife: “what’s the capital of Latvia”
My 14 year old: “idk” [Editor’s Note: for those of you not in touch with the texting lingo, “idk” means “I don’t know”]
My wife:Â “find out”
My 14 year old: “Y”
My wife: “do it – don’t make me come up there”
My 14 year old: “fine”
After just a few seconds of anxious waiting:
My 14 year old: “Riga”
My wife: “thanks”
My 14 year old: “welcome”
And that’s a typical evening and typical exchange in our modern family environment. I stand in awe of so many things in this exchange:
(1) My wife knew where to go get the answer – according to our kids, they know everything
(2) My 14 year old (as she always does) wanted to know the context of the question rather than just finding the answer; I think “why” is the most used word in her vocabulary today (of course, other than “Dad”, which starts every statement she make to me); I’m kind of proud of her for not blindly responding to anything she’s asked – just wish it wasn’t on absolutely everything she’s asked to do
(3) Our entire family now realizes you don’t have to leave the chair to get an answer to any question you may have; if you don’t have your laptop, then you text someone that does and get to the answer; if you do have your laptop and your just too lazy to look something up, you still text someone else and have them look it up for you; location doesn’t mean anything – anytime, anywhere access to answers to questions; by the way, it goes both ways too, it’s not just parents to the kids, but quite often its kids to the parents too
After getting the answer to the capital of Latvia (I’m so glad I know that now), both my wife and my 14 year old had to stop what they were doing because my 14 year old all the sudden wanted her nails painted. And the world had to stop exactly at that moment and focus on her nails. That broke my wife’s concentration on the crossword puzzle, and when that concentration is broken it’s real tough to get it back. Of course my 14 year old has to move to dry her nails – and by move I mean run around the house – annoyingly so – interrupting and making totally random conversation – so concentration would have been impossible anyway.
As the annoying interruptions eased, we got back to focusing for no more than 5 minutes when my 14 year old comes walking into the room again with a new revelation – “I spilt the nail polish on the carpet in the loft”. My wife immediately turned to crisis recovery mode heading upstairs to assess and resolve the problem (does anyone know how to get nail polish out of carpet?) – and as she’s lecturing my daughter on the errors of her ways, I hear this motherly point:
My wife: “if you’re going to do your toes, put them up on the desk so you can reach them”
Now I’m not a genius and I’m not even sure I heard that comment and the rest of that conversation right, but I’m pretty proud of the mentoring and on the job training that my wife was giving to my 14 year old at that time.
How’s that for a modern and yet not so modern family!