One of the things I love most about summer is the chance to just hang out with my kids and not have the push of schedules. The boys and I have gotten some things accomplished this summer, but it feels different when the only deadline is self-imposed and not until the end of August. Mostly, though we've done a lot of nothing productive and we like that. We've sat around together and read, played on our "electronic gadgets," eaten ice cream sandwiches, and just been generally lazy. Now that there's less than a month of summer left, though, I can feel a bit of the deadline looming. I'm evaluating how we've spent our time and how we should spend the rest of our summer. It's interesting, I've never thought about the word "spend" in that context until just now as I'm writing. I think it's easy to not really make a choice on the time and just dribble it away instead of being conscious of our spending. With only less than a month left in my summer I want to be purposeful about how I/we spend our time.
The reason I titled this post, "the order matters" is because living, loving, and laughing are way more important to me than time on the computer (blogging or otherwise). I've been thinking about how easy it is for the boys and I to end up starting to do our gadgets for just a little bit and then getting sucked into it for too long. We still talk to each other and share about what we're doing, but it's much more of a parallel play scenario than an interactive one. I want us to interact. The lure of the electronics is big though, so we have to make that conscious choice about our spending. We'll talk today about living, loving, and laughing together and about being on gadgets, and what matters to us and how we live that.
Anyway, the boys are up now and I want to live what I'm speaking, so...I'm off.
So, this past weekend I went camping with my family and some close family friends. I took my cell phone, but left it in the car during the day. If I had taken it to the lake with me, I would have been tempted to check my email, the news, and even the weather (which I could also check by just looking around me!). By leaving it in the car, I was able to be totally present with my family and friends. I have read two or three articles in the news (yes, on my phone) recently which talk about how well people really multitask with their phones and how well they pay attention to information around them when they are "plugged" in. One of my gripes is to talk to my husband and have him not looking me in the eye because he is doing something on the computer at the same time (he says he can still listen). What research is suggesting is the same as my perception... he doesn't necessarily get it all because his attention is divided. I think we all need to do a good job of focusing on the
ReplyDeletePEOPLE around us instead of our gadgets. I want to be a good example of that to my kids.