For me and most moms I know, the process of raising a child creates a kind of ”what’s mom’s is mine” mentality. When a colicky baby becomes an “active” toddler and you can finally appease him with half your beloved Auntie Anne’s pretzel, you do it. You are willing to sacrifice a lifetime Oprah for Arthur and Cyberchase if he will just let you stop pushing Thomas around the track for 15 minutes. From my milkshake to my Snuggie to my favorite magazine they need to cut up for a project, what’s mine is theirs.
So, when my husband informed me that my cell phone contract would be up soon and that I should think about a new phone, I knew that the iPhone that I wanted would be a communal one. What I didn’t know is how difficult that could be.
The difficulty does not arise in refereeing whose turn it is to use it. The difficulty arises in the fact that much of what comes along with the device is really made for adults.
Take a look through the Top 25 apps in the App Store and you will find something completely inappropriate for 11- to 6-year-olds to even see listed. So for communal use, I have to disable the App Store.
Add to that the fact that Safari, the web browser on the iPhone, cannot be filtered. Whatever you typically filter from your kids on the internet is competely accessible on the iPhone. That’s not acceptable to me.
I found an app called Mobicip, which is an iPhone or iPod Touch browser with age-based filtering. So I disabled Safari and figured I could work from within Mobicip. It’s a fine filter, but from it I cannot add appointments to my Google calendar. It says “Error trying to save event. Please try again later.” But later never comes. I also cannot launch my Google app (the app is somehow tied to Safari) to take me directly to my calendar, tasks, docs and such. Kills the purpose of a PDA.
So, I often find myself in the “settings” area switching on and off the Apps Store and Safari based on in whose hands I expect the device to be next.
Can the iPhone be communal? Only with contstant oversight. As with most digital distractions in today’s world, vigilant monitoring is still required.
I know, we’re already into the fourth day of Advent, but that Sunday after Thanksgiving just comes way too quickly for me. Even with a late start, this is a worthwhile activity.
For the past few years my kids and I have created an Advent calendar with the help of Family Fun magazine’s website. Family Fun’s calendar comes with a fun thing to do on each day on the countdown to Christmas — like create a snow scene with shaving cream and action figures or make a gift for your teacher. Some days come with a holiday joke.
I like to set a more spiritual tone for Advent, so for our calendar I use Family Fun’s template but put in some of my own activities. I add things like pick a Christmas card and pray for the person who sent it, set up the Nativity Scene, read about the angel’s message to Mary in the Gospel of Luke, and pray the Rosary on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary. I also include our own holiday traditions like take a drive to look at Christmas lights and watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” together. The kids do the cutting and pasting, but I put the activities in secretly so they’re a surprise.
It’s a treat every morning for the kids to open the day’s door and make plans for how we’ll carry out the activity that night. And it really does help us to think about preparing the way for Christ in our hearts and in our world.
Get the complete printouts at these three Family Fun web pages: calendar, ornaments, activities. It’s not too late to get in on the fun. If you want a list of our activities, comment here and I’ll get it to you.
Today is Rose Red’s 9th birthday. Before today I might have described her as the most thoughtful member of the household, but she seems to have inspired her brothers to greatness.
Cool Breeze, with his own savings, bought her a toy she wanted and a Hello Kitty DS game he thought she would like. “I just want to do something great for her because she always helps me out,” he said, as I suggested he only had to buy her one gift.
Dirt Diver colored her a detailed picture and presented her with breakfast in bed this morning — all his own idea. He served Eggos with whipped cream on our tradtional Happy Birthday plate and ice, cold milk in our flashing-lights celebratory drinking glass.
She was thrilled with the honor her brothers showed her. On the digital side, she loved the video game. On the unplugged side, she basked in the breakfast treat. So I guess it takes both, the digital and the unplugged, to make this birthday complete.
We have seven television channels. We don’t have dish or cable. Just don’t want to go there. And now we don’t need to.
After at least a year of the digital kids gathered around the laptop watching episodes of Hannah Montana, we have finally done the smartest thing ever. Bought a Roku. This digital video player connects to my home internet connection and accesses my Netflix account. Anything I can play instantly on Netflix I can watch through the Roku on my television screen. You can access Amazon too, but I haven’t done that. Now we can have iCarly marathons any time we want — with no commercials.
The small black box comes out of the package and sets up in a matter of minutes. Cost is $99.99 plus $14.99 shipping. You need a minimum speed of 1.2 Mbps, typically met by DSL or cable internet connections, and it works with wireless or wired connections. The quality is slightly grainy, but for someone who got her analog signal from an old-fashioned antenna on her roof until the world went digital, it’s really not too bad. A more high-powered internet connection might improve it.
Not everything is available to play instantly, but there’s enough to keep yourself busy. My new guilty pleasure — MI-5, a thrilling look from the BBC at the world of the clandestine British security service. The guys aren’t as tough as my favorites on The Unit, but they do have British accents.
Five months ago RuneScape was the only thing Cool Breeze could talk or think about. The mmorpg (massive multiplayer online role-playing game) consumed the then 10-year-old. I listened in during a car ride as he and a friend talked for 40 minutes straight about the game, its adventures and strategy.
I wrote before about my worry at delving into this new world. I decided then to inform myself through What They Play, discussions with my gamer brother, and by playing a little myself. Life lessons were learned — someone hacked into Cool Breeze’s account and took all his gold. There were helpful people in the Rune Scape world and there were thugs.
As soon as I was really getting up to speed, it all just stopped. Two weeks into June, RuneScape was abandoned. “Just got tired of it,” Cool Breeze says.
I’m glad it doesn’t consume him anymore — scoring real-life touchdowns and getting to the YAFL Super Bowl are today’s topics of note — but I’m also glad we went through the process. Although I’m still wary of online games, I understand them more and will be ready to assess the next one that come along. And I’m sure another one will come along.
Ever wonder how to behave properly on Facebook? Etiquette expert Thelma Domenici gave the advice that follows in a column early this year. It’s worth reviewing periodically.
“Friend” only people you actually know. That means in making a friend request and in accepting a request.
If you get an unwanted friend request, ignore it. That is the most honest thing you can do and you won’t have the need to undo anything later.
It is acceptable in Facebook to de-friend people, especially if you really have no connection to them even virtually or if you find their views and the items they post on your wall to be offensive. If they discover it and ask you about it, you can say honestly that you wanted to create a more manageable list.
It is fine to make a friend request to someone you’ve just met; however, don’t be upset if they ignore it. Along those same lines, don’t be offended if you find yourself removed from someone’s list of friends. They’re not trying to offend, just creating a more manageable list.
Keep your Facebook site personal, and only accept friends with whom you want to share your personal life. For your work life, create a LinkedIn account. Direct professional contacts there if they request to befriend you on Facebook.
For safety’s sake, take a close look at your privacy settings, especially if you have a lot of marginal “friends.” There’s really no need to share your telephone number and email address, among other things, with everybody.
Do you have any Facebook etiquette advice from the trenches? Any lessons learned? I’m seriously considering a Facebook purge. More on that to come.
Although the skies did not produce the “brilliant fireballs” promised for Digital Mom’s star party (we had a cloudy horizon), we did have a great time reclining on the driveway, using our NASA star finder, and messing around with the flashlight. Dirt Diver picked out Scorpius, the Big Dipper and the Southern Cross before I could.
I plan to keep up with what’s happening in the sky at stardate.org/nightsky/almanac. We’ll be looking for Jupiter to the lower left of the moon on Aug. 5 – 6 and for the Perseid meteor shower Aug. 12-13.
Did anyone else catch the Capricornid meteor show?
There’s something about the starry night that makes keeping the kids up late worth while. Tonight we hope to get a live action show as the Capricornids meteor shower peaks with its “brilliant fireballs.” Skyscrapers Inc. has a good description and how to improve your chances of seeing the shower. We’ll start observing right after sunset in the east-southeast about 20 degrees above the horizon.
For star maps from your location, enter your latitude and longitude, or chose from a list of cities, at fourmilab.ch/yoursky. For a fun game to play as you watch and wait, make a Star Finder, an astronomical variation of the old “cootie catcher” or “fortune teller” featured at NASA’s Space Place. Fun fact: NASA was established this day, July 29, in 1958. Let’s celebrate with a star party tonight.
My mom scared me last week with the news that Kodak would no longer make film.
“What? No film?” I panicked.
Turns out her facts were off. Kodak will stop making Kodachrome, which is a slide film that represents a fraction of 1 percent of Kodak’s total sales of still-picture films, according to the company. Even when I did shoot slides to go with a few magazine stories I wrote in 2003, I used Ektachrome.
It was the panic at the thought of the no more film that really made me think. I love the creative things I can do with digital photos — compiling them onto DVDs, scrapbook pages, easily sharing them with my family — and the instant gratification. Photography is something I spend time on every day, a hobby passed down to me from my mother and my grandmother.
However, I do miss the richness and clarity of my 35mm shots. My Canon EOS Rebel was the first major purchase my husband and I made after we were married. I bought it for my first reporter/photographer job at a community newspaper, as I needed to return the Nikon I’d commandeered from my mom. I used it at various jobs and assignments and at home for 14 years. I literally loved and still love that camera. It takes beautiful pictures.
I avoided digital photography for a long time because I just didn’t like the quality of the images I saw. I didn’t get a digital camera until two years ago. It’s not a good camera, maybe because it was inexpensive. It washes out everything, can’t shoot a moving subject to save its life, and it’s temperamental. But now I’m hooked.
Although I know I can’t abandon digital, Kodak’s announcement inspires me to go buy some film, shoot a roll, and wait with anticipation for the images to be handed to me from behind a photo counter. I know it will be worth it.
Digital Mom ~ Raising Kids in a Digital World explores what parents need to know as our children grow up in the age of mmorpgs, apps and endless gadgets. From what's fun to what to avoid, blogger Melissa Sais is in constant research mode and shares her findings with you. Sais is a freelance writer. See her resume and clips pages for more information.
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Five months ago RuneScape was the only thing 
