iQuestion

Are your children as interesting as your smart phone?

 

After a chat with Squirt Baby, I’ve come to the realization that I know the answer to this one.  For sure. Absolutely certain.  I’m able to answer this question without even thinking about it, or weighing up things like:

 

1. Before Siri, smart phones didn’t talk back.
2. Smart phone apps are quite inexpensive.
3. Smart phones have a range of accessories that can protect and enhance an experience: a case so they don’t shatter when you drop ‘em, an armband to wear when you’re jogging, a set of earbuds to filter out the sound of fighting, crying, tweenie attitude.
4. Smart phones can be muted.
5. Smart phones don’t fight with each other.  Nor do they eat, get up in the middle of the night, whinge, chuck tantrums, carry on …

Oh, but the question is: are your children as interesting as your smart phones, not as, ahem, well behaved. Or not.  As well behaved.

 

That’s different altogether.  Although smart phones can give you driving directions, children can provide interesting conversation about things like mean girls, penises, injustices regarding junk food and other kids getting x and y while they, in fact, never get anything.

 

Although smart phones provide you with a hook up to Words with Friends, your children can pester you for a game of Monopoly, Scrabble, Cluedo, and then if they lose, upend the board, scream at siblings and go sit in a room for an hour of time out.  Although smart phones give you access to Facebook, Livejournal, Twitter, friend’s list and overseas talk about TV, gardening, weather, tides, trends, paparazzi, inroads into psychology, astrology, education, medicine, technology, children provide interest in an array of other discussions.

 

Special things.  Insightful things.

 

Things that should never be taken for granted.  Treasured snippets of important family information and their personal milestones.  Conversations that need recording.  For posterity, and because here they are, fruits of your own loins and what they are saying (to you.  To me) is valuable and interesting.

 

They’re our children.  They’re so much more interesting than a piece of palm-fitted, gloriously-cased technological communication of YUM.

 

Our beautiful kids.  Interesting, eloquent, wanting to interact with stimulating talk:

 

Like ‘what’s for dinner?’  Or ‘You said I could go to see that with her!’  Or, ‘you are stupid, you mean and horrible mum!’  Or even ‘I hate (insert foodstuff).  We never have McDonalds or pizza or chips, not like Sue-ann’s family’.

 

Or, a current favourite, ‘You have no idea how that feels.’

 

That’s right.  I don’t.  But what I do know is this:  children are much more interesting than my smart phone, they never have to compete with a text message at dinner time, an email during story time, an internet search while they are interacting with their mother.

 

Okay.  That last bit is a total lie.  Sometimes my children do have to compete with my smart phone, but it’s not because they’re less interesting.  I don’t think it is.  Oh, I’m sure it’s not.  Really sure:  Pip is more interesting than customizing my screen wallpaper.  Pop is more interesting than the (OMFG orgasmic!) world clock app.  Pip is more stimulating than iCal, and Pop is more involving than This Music Trivia Game … oh my, that game!

 

YES.  Oh, praise the iLord, yes!  My children are so much more interesting than my smart phone.  If I tell myself this often enough, I’ll forget the time when I asked Siri to find the kids, only to have her say ‘that’s not possible.  You’re a pathetic mother … bitch.’

 

Is there an app to make the kids as interesting as a smart phone?  Just joking.

 

Sorta.