Writing a Blog Post

I need to write a blog post.  But my almost (as in 8 days) 6 year old has other ideas.  I prefer to write without having people talk to me, or a lot of distracting noise.  So of course she has decided she needs to lie on the floor of my office and play on her tablet.

She is supposed to be using one of her educational apps.  Rather than playing games as we have a lot of driving scheduled this afternoon and that is when she gets to play games on her tablet.

 Yes I would love for my life to be such that she didn’t have technology in the car.  But if she doesn’t have her tablet she spends the whole time talking to me, and wanting me to follow her stories, and asking me how the universe works while I am driving and dealing with the other kids in the car. 

 That becomes a safety issue.  She is so insistent on the answers to her questions, and often I am dealing with weather, traffic and/or trying to listen to my audio book (which is some days the only “me” time I get) and it becomes really distracting and then frustrating to talk to her while all of this is going on.

 If I let her take her tablet with her she doesn’t need me as much and she is happy playing her games.  My other kids are often either listening to an audio book as a group with me, or listening to their own audio books separately.  But my six year old doesn’t really like audio books. At. All. She likes being read to by a person, but not often just listening to a book.

 We live about a half an hour from everything.  Or at least it feels that way. The closest local grocery store is about 15 minutes down the road, and there are convenience stores closer than that, but anything else, is about a half an hour away.  Including everyone’s Girl Scouts. So at a minimum of twice a week we are gone doing stuff that is at least a half an hour away from home.

 I am as environmentally conscious as I can be.  We don’t run to town every day, and I do my absolute best to group all  my errands on days when we are out anyway and in that particular town. Except for the occasional international trips we don’t fly and we are in the midst of harvesting and preserving a lot of local food.  We also grow a lot of the meat and all of the eggs we eat which makes their carbon footprint smaller if not a positive as it helps increase the organic matter on our small acreage.

 So our twice weekly car trips tend to be long, a minimum of an hour in the car and more often longer as we are doing a bunch of stops along the way.  And that’s okay. But it also means that I don’t have the brain power to explain how the universe works while I am driving, because these trips usually are late afternoon into the night kind of trips and even without being pregnant I am tired.

 So I totally allow technology.  We used to have a dvd player in the back seat and they would watch dvds.  However, when that broke we didn’t replace it as it was free to us to begin with.  I am not sure they would all agree on what to watch at this point anyway. But when they were all super little it was a godsend when it was working.

 We are working on giving our kids a pretty analog childhood.  A little tv, some tablet time, and they have an Amazon Echo for music and audio books.  And otherwise they spend hours outside everyday and their only interaction with the computer is for schoolwork.  And we do as much of that with real books and paper still as we can.

 Well my cute almost 6 year old has moved on.  She is currently playing with her sisters and hopefully working on their chores as we are out from 2 pm until 8 pm tonight.  It has taken me hours to write this post, but here it is anyway. She’s just ducked in again for a complaint and a hug.  

 Because this is how things get done here, in and around the girls.

Read more of my parenting adventures in my Mommy Rebellion: Brutal Honesty About Motherhood and Other Sh@t We Pretend We Love.