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“Um, Mommy… I just spilt my juice all over Daddy’s computer.”
Of course she was joking. That’s what we thought anyway. But no... there was the laptop, open for watching a movie, with red smoothie juice spread all over it. You could literally see the sticky fluid seeping into the keyboard, the disk drive, the on/off button. “NOOOOOOOOOOO!” Safety be damned! I yanked off my seatbelt and crawled into the back seat, desperately trying to stop as much of the damage as I could while my husband pulled the car over to the side of the road and proceeded to almost have a heart attack. It was an ironic moment actually, since just last week I posted a blog about how technology fails us. We have become reliant (overly so) on screen time to make the 10 hour drive go by more quickly for our daughter (and thus for us.) We force her off of it every now and then for at least an hour. “Look at that beautiful mountain,” we say. But she barely looks up from her screen (laptop or iPod) and we are left to enjoy the vistas on our own. No on this trip, however. This juice spill happened 3 hours into our journey; which left about 8 to fill computerless. Granted the first two were spent in tears, apologies, and questions about whether daddy would ever forgive her. But after the tension in the car finally mellowed, we were left with wonderful stop-over in Crater Lake, some fun car games, some nice discussions, and a little bit of iPod time. Strangely, it was one of our nicer car trips. The fact of the matter is that technology is not really to blame for over reliance; sometimes we let ourselves down with low expectations. Next time, whether we have a computer available or not there will be new rules for the amount of time she spends staring at a screen.
1 Comment
7/3/2013 06:54:33 am
Whenever I see commercials that have TV screens in cars or kids on computers, it actually makes me sad. When I was young and our large family took cross country vacations, I remembered playing all kinds of games in the car that forced us to look at things around us. On freeways and highways it was the license plate game. Each of us would record when we saw a license plate from a state other than our own. At the end of an hour, whoever had found the most got to pick the next game. Another was the geography game. The idea was to be the first to notice new things in the geography. When we would start it would be broad ideas like an evergreen tree vs a deciduous tree, or a mountain vs a lake. But as the trip went on we would notice smaller differences like the rocks on the mountain in this section are larger and like slabs, somewhere else it is more like sand or pebbles with lots of colors. Finally, if it was a particularly boring piece of road we would always play animal, vegetable, or mineral. The game where one person takes on the "persona" of an animal, vegetable, or mineral and those int he car get 20 yes/no questions to figure out who/what that person is. Leave a Reply. |
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Deanne WilstedLink here to Betting Jessica on Amazon.com Archives
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