Splitting Thanksgiving

Our holidays as a married couple have been surprisingly stress free. Both of our families like to gather everyone together for all the big holidays.  So far we've been able to navigate visiting both families for every holiday. A major component of this success lies with two attributes of our families.

First, both of our parents live near to us. This means that we can visit both families on the holidays without having to travel long distances. We don't have to pick between visiting one or the other family.

The other attribute is that Ben's family has a tendency to celebrate holidays on days that aren't the actual holiday. This occurs primarily when Michael and his family come down to visit.

This is what happened for Thanksgiving this year. We were able to have Thanksgiving dinner with the Ashtons. Then two days later we had another Thanksgiving dinner with the Stuarts.  Lots of good food; surprisingly I didn't gain much weight!

Ashton Thanksgiving

The Patriarch surveying the table.

Dejah introduced Andrew to the joys of eating whipping cream straight from the can

We met Kevin's Girlfriend

Blew out Dejah's birthday cake candles

Andrew explored underneath the table

Good food; good drink let's hurry up and eat

The girls talked it up after dinner

Andrew played...

...and studied.

Stuart Thanksgiving

After the food was served all of the Stuart's gathered together to take family pictures.

Two babies. Guess I better get used to this!

Little cubbies

Andrew has always been an explorer. He finds the nooks and crannies in the House. This is his most recent find.

Learning name

It is never too early to teach a child their name right?

Why weren't the parents paying attention?

"Why weren't the parents paying attention?"  Early this October on boards, and comments on newspapers articles the internet screamed with this question. The parents in question were parents of two teenage girls who have been accused of cyber-bullying another teenager who eventually committed suicide. 

Interviews with both parents of the bullying victim and the bullies found that they all checked their child's Facebook page. All of them thought they were monitoring their child's social media habits and messages. All of them were wrong. None were aware of the messages that were being sent through other social media avenues such as Kik messenger and ask.fm.

When reading the news-articles I had to ask myself, "Would I have known?" Unfortunately the answer would have been no. I like to think of myself as at least competent in the area of technology. Reading through the list of social media apps that were used I did not recognize a majority of them. Upon further research I found articles describing the newest "generation" of social media. Apps such as Pheed, Wanelo , or 4chan have never even entered into my field of awareness. Even a casual perusal of the websites and apps show that they all have active populations. Even more disturbing was how easy it is on many of these apps to access inappropriate content. 

Andrew is only fifteen months old, so it's a little early for me to start worrying about his social media habits. That doesn't stop me though. He is growing up in a world that is increasing connected through media. Eliminating the use of social media is impractical. For better or worse it is becoming more and more integrated into our everyday world. I won't be able to monitor every single website or app that Andrew ever looks at. How do I as a parent allow my child to participate in media community while at the same time protecting them? I don't see easy answers. I'm sure it's a question that I'm going to struggle with for the next thirty years or so.