Official Skate

Yesterday our Internet connection was down.  No big deal, we'll just.... hmm...what will we do?  Technology is weaved so tightly into the fabric of our lives that when one thread is pulled out we are left with a bit of a hole to fill.

I often hear about these promotions to "turn it off" or to get "unplugged" and I think they sound great in theory.  These challenges are often preceded with stats about the number of hours people spend watching TV, gaming, texting, surfing, chatting, messaging.... And I think ya, we should do that someday.  But we never do.  Unless of course there is a power outage.

With all the media attention about the passing of Steve Jobs it's impossible not to think about the impact technology has on our daily existence.  I've decided that I'm at peace with technology being intertwined throughout my day. It doesn't have to be the bad guy.  I check the forecast on my phone first thing in the morning.  I may check status updates while the girls are playing in the bath.  And there are even times that I'm watching TV, surfing the web, sending a text, and chatting on the land line.  And it's all good because when I've had enough I just power down.  And we go and do something...

Like taking Callie to her first official skating lesson.

We have been anticipating her skating debut for weeks.... wondering how it would turn out, would she actually go on the ice, would she like it, how much encouragement would she need, would she wear figure skates or hockey skates...

I just have to say, she was awesome! She confidently chose hockey skates and wanted to wear her "team shirt" as she calls it.  She could hardly contain her own enthusiasm. And when I say awesome it's not that she went out there and skated circles around the other kids.  She was awesome because I'm her mom and I will always be her biggest fan.  I will always be proud of her for taking that chance, for trying something new.  I will always be the mom who is taking a ton of pictures, high fiving, and grinning from ear to ear.

And I wasn't her only fan...

This was Callie's third time skating.  Here was her second.  And her first, well there was some crying involved.  I loved watching all the little Bambi's out there on the ice, their legs working so hard to keep them standing up while trying to produce a forward motion only to feel the cold, hard ice on their bottoms.

I have a new Facebook profile picture displaying my shaky-legged four-year-old at her first skating lesson and Jon has a new BBM picture.  I love making memories.  And thanks to technology I can share them, post them and write about them...and keep them stored in the digital world.  And someday we will click back in our archives and say remember when just the same as if we had stacks of photo albums on the shelf.

Now it's time to unplug.