Parenting Through Facebook Posts 101

My 14 year old daughter was home sick from school yesterday with a cough, and we all know that coughs are no longer a publicly shared condition. Soo...

I asked if she could help me with my blog format.
Within an hour of zooming from Photobucket to flickr over to Tinypic and back to Picnic, she came up with this great new header.  She then fiddle diddled with HTML and  and voila . . . 3 perfectly aligned columns!  I absolutely love it and couldn't have done it on my own, at least not in this calendar year.

Which brings me to my 

Topic for today:

My reason for writing this blog, in part was to try and keep up with the ever changing world of communication my girl's live in.  I decided I would not be left coughing in the dust of my children's techno expertise.

Who was I kidding?

I still have a hard time answering my cell phone.  (it's new, by the way)

This journey into the unknown began two years ago with Facebook, which my daughter was mentioning casually in conversation.  "All her friends had one."   I was skeptical.  How did it work?  Was it safe?

I had a choice:  Join facebook myself and jump in with my water wings and learn about the good the bad and the ugly.  Or I could sit on the dock forbid her to participate and watch with the sun in my eyes,  completely unaware of anything going on beneath the waves.

I decided her use of facebook would likely be inevitable. So what better way to be a "present" parent than to jump in and help her maneuver through the tricky rapids of a white water twitter rafting world?

So, here I am trying my best to decipher their world.  Twitter?  What is that? What do I need it for? Do I need birdseed? Who would follow me?  

No one obviously, that's not the point.

The point is, my daughter will twitter, and I can follow her (honestly, I don't think her generation has  thought this one through very well),  and her younger sisters are not far behind.

I remember thinking that the generation gap would not be nearly as vast, as was the case with my parents and their parents before them.

photo credit

Surely my children will not look back at my life and wonder how I survived?  Yet the gap is undeniably there and widening.  They have never touched a typewriter, nor listened to an 8 track, and between you and me, I think they might be calling me Nana behind my back.

While my teen shuns speaking on the phone, she happily corresponds via email, msn, facebook, and texting (Please note:  she does not have her own cell phone, yet somehow intrinsically knows how to text at warp speed, I've clocked her.)

I am going to have to sprint to keep up.  The slow blog jog I am currently taking will not do the trick.

I want to live in their world, not complain about it.  Or even worse,  get up on my soapbox and question it's validity?

Instead I will look it straight in the face and say, "Oh go for a tumblr why don't you", or "you don't make me twitter one little bit", or "I've heard that facebook isn't even a bestseller."

Oh yeah, I'll show them!  As they scroll through my "words of wisdom" on their facebook homepage I will not be far from their thoughts.  As I Tweet sweetly about my day, they won't be able to shake me.

And my parenting plan would be foolproof. . . if only I could figure out how to text without always turning this crazy thing off.  

Oh, I am sooo being left in the dust.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go wash the grit out of my teeth.