Parenting through the decades

Okay, so I lost momentum with my house story. I love that story, it's one of my favorites. I had envisioned 4 nice little posts, only days apart with pictures to back up my "story". However, my craft room is a total mess and I couldn't get to the very first picture I wanted so I did what every perfectionist does, I procrastinated, and then procrastinated some more until I lost my ummph to tell the story. Maybe next year, maybe next week, who really knows.... Anyway, I decided it was time to get back in the saddle (so to speak) and we're moving on. This week has been a weird week. Ryan has been off all week (which was great) but "normally" we go away for a couple of days. "Normally" I save up our spring break for this week. This year was a little different. We took a partial spring break early March when Emily was home and then we took the other half the week before Easter. Everyone's activities and classes were still going on - we had gotten so far behind in just normal house maintenance that we decided a stay cation would be best. Believe me, the time was filled! Ian's Sunday School class had planned a campout for this weekend so all of my boys went. The girls and I had a good, fun girl's night Friday night. We went out to dinner, watched a movie and stayed up laughing and talking together until 1:00 am! I was telling Emily that on Thursday, Alexa got "caught" (she was doing it in plain sight - not trying to hide her 'helping' tool.) using Google translate to "help" finish the sentences in her Latin assignment. She explained that she didn't see much difference than using dictionary.com. How I noticed what she was doing was because Ian was "waiting" in line for the laptop. He wanted to google the place they were going camping to see how close the lake was to where they were going to sleep. Emily started laughing at how different technologically my younger two kids are than my older two. She would have never thought, nor knew how, to use Google translate. Owen didn't use/search the internet until middle school. (Just to put a disclaimer here - we have the necessary parental codes/filters on our computers to protect our children - they don't just 'wander' the internet.) From that conversation, I started thinking about television. I despise television. My children know this about me and love me in spite of it! When my older two were 'growing' up, we didn't have cable. We didn't have cable until about 5 years ago. Last night for our girl's night movie, Alexa downloaded a Netflix movie for us to watch. It just amazes me; sometimes for the good, sometimes for the bad. During school hours, the television, gaming systems, computers (unless for school purposes) are not allowed without permission. They find other ways to fill their time, and they are very good at it. But come the weekend, an electronic device is almost always their first choice for their downtime. Then, after a while, with little to no prompting from me, most of them will go in search of something else to do - crafts, go outside, jump on the trampoline, just run and play and be crazy kids. There are 9 years between my oldest and my youngest. There will be nine years (or more) between my youngest and our addition. Sometimes I get overwhelmed and fearful of all the new "challenges" electronics may bring in the next decade. Then, I look out and see my younger two 'techno' kids running outside or playing some detailed imaginary game - just like my older two used to do - and I think - It'll be okay. We'll roll when we need to roll and unplug when we need to unplug.