It was a busy week. We learned some lessons about text messages in my family, watched an eight year old give a great pep talk that would inspire anyone, learned that Conrad Black is back, contemplated the make-versus-buy Valentine’s Day card dilemma and we read in horror about babies getting tattoos.
1. Firstly, a little story about my son and his poor communication skills with a cell phone. Last Sunday, I received a text from him with this exact message: Can u come home as soon as u can I hit a tree skiing backwards. My phone is out of battery so you won’t be able to text me back. And I’m supposed to be calm after that? No, I was not calm at all. I was the exact opposite of calm. I went crazy and proceeded to make a dozen phone calls and eventually found an adult who helped him and was able to talk me off the cliff. But this story is about him (the poor kid), not me. Thankfully he is fine, but it’s also about my realization that kids are not able to communicate effectively anymore—and I’m blaming technology. They are texting messages without real words, using no punctuation and whipping out updates with very little thought or accuracy. If there was thought behind his text it would have included these words: ‘I’m OK. I didn’t hit my head.’ Words and phrases are being thrown out at the speed of light. Teach your kids to text properly. Tell them to take a deep breath, be thoughtful in their communications and try to be accurate. Their English teachers will appreciate it as well. OMG.
2. If your kids are looking for a bit of a pep talk, they can turn to the next self-proclaimed voice of their generation—a kid who calls himself Kid President on YouTube (#kidpresident). He has become a bit of a sensation since he posted his first video in July, but his most recent video has had over 4-million hits in just five days. That puts him safely at the top of the digital charts this week. Watch the video—it’s great. Even my too-cool-for-school teenage boys thought it was awesome. They watched it while recovering from the backwards ski incident (geniuses). There are a lot of good lines in the pep talk but my favourite one is ‘Don’t stop believing…unless your dream is stupid…then you should get another dream.’
3. In unrelated news, I read that Conrad is going to host a new talk show catering to the ‘zoomer generation.’ I’m glad he’s going mainstream so he doesn’t have to compete with the likes of #kidpresident online. His new show will be airing on the Moses Znaimer’s new Vision TV channel, targeting the zoomers. That’s not us. According to the promotional material, he’ll be interviewing ‘some of the world’s greats.’ Who could that be?
4. And back to mom news. I read a great blog post on one of my favourite parenting websites, Babble, the other day. It talked about why buying Valentine’s Day cards is not a mom cop-out. In fact, it’s perfectly acceptable. This might seem like a trivial issue to most, but for moms—in the middle of February, when we have to get our four year old to school on time with 35 hand written cards and some kind of treat to go with—it’s a big project. So people like Martha and sites like Pinterest don’t make us feel better with all their crafty inspiration. What does? The dollar store. That’s where we need to go sometimes to get things done. There, I said it. You can make it or fake it. Nobody is judging.
5. Finally, I saw a horrific video making the rounds this week about a mom who forced her five month old child to get a tattoo. I’m not including the link because it’s too disturbing. After some investigation though, I learned that it’s not a true story. I was relieved but disturbed again at the thought that someone went to the trouble to create the video and that it was going viral so quickly. Why don’t the good news stories catch our attention as well?
Send me your good news story and I’ll post it next week.
Have a good week.
Tagged under: from the editor's desk
Category: entertainment
