Grasshopper New Media Presents...

To date, I have been five solid days without Internet access, with no end in sight. Although its absence has done wonders for the state of my housekeeping, I feel like I’ve lost — albeit temporarily — one of my most valuable parenting tools. In just the past two days, I’ve felt unable to answer some of these basic parenting questions:

• What does that cough mean?

Boobaby had a little cough yesterday, which I insisted was caused by a poorly-chewed piece of apple skin. My wife, on the other hand, thought it might be an early sign of a cold. Since Boo’s never really been sick, we’re still amateurs at detecting symptoms — something about lymph nodes, right? We’d have loved to check out some of the medical sites and parenting discussion groups about what to look for. No dice!

• Can we get more diapers?

Going to the mall is a soul-sucking ordeal for me, but I’m in charge of all the non-discretionary baby stuff. Need more diapers for Boo? Hello, Amazon! I’ve already got a list of 9 items to order as soon as the Internet returns to me!

• Are raisins dangerous?

A friend expressed surprise that 21-month old Boobaby is allowed to have raisins a couple of months ago. The baby books I have give vague answers about cavities, so I looked it up on BabyCenter.com and found that they recommend that kids not eat raisins until they’re four years old! Since I had Web access, I quickly searched up a few more sites and found one that was fine with raisins for kids as young as six months. (Amazingly, that recommendation came from BabyCenter’s British site!) Without some Internet search skills, Boo might have gone raisin-free until kindergarten!

• What can I do this holiday weekend?

I’ve grown dependent on Web searches for activity ideas. Where’s the Veteran’s Day parade? Does our science museum have anything special going on this weekend? Is the zoo open on a holiday Monday? Without a local search, I’ve got no clue. Add to that the fact that we get our news online, too, so we don’t have the Sunday paper as a fallback!

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There’s something else, though. The Internet provides practical answers to searchers with a critical eye, but its single most valuable feature for me as a parent is my blog: a way to remember and share the experience of raising a child on a near-daily basis. Sure, I could scrapbook or make photo albums, but when I’ve done that in the past, the bulky tomes have mostly gathered dust. They’re great 50 years later, I’m sure, but a blog is instant and widespread — and since I’m held accountable to other members of the family, I’m more likely to blog immediately, rather than waiting a year to make an album of slightly faded memories.Prose is key, too. Keeping a parenting blog forces me to write real paragraphs about my growing family, not just captions. Painful as the process can be, by writing daily I work out the mixed emotions that this confusing business called parenting brings up. Stacking word on word and sentence on sentence solidifies this era of my life, and pictures alone wouldn’t suffice for me.

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I’ve already looked back at my year-old blog and made startling discoveries about experiences I’d all but forgotten in only a few months. I can hardly wait to read my same entries 20 years from now! I just hope that I’ll understand how this one week got lost from my parenting archives.

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by Doodaddy

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[tags]kids, children, parents, parenting, internet, strategy, strategies, learning, education, growth, improvement, technology, Internet, computers[/tags]
Photo graciously provided by selva, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved