I’ve written before about how important it is to disconnect. I have a son who is incredibly needy and quite often, no matter what work deadlines I have, I am forced to shut down my computer and give him my dedicated attention. After all, he deserves it. He’s in school all day and I work primarily from home. There is no reason I shouldn’t be done with my work by 3pm and able to give him 100%.
Heck, I can’t even find time to work out yet alone shut down at 3pm. I am busy from the moment I drop my kids off at school until late at night. I could spend all day on the computer. Being a freelancer, that’s how the cookie crumbles, and as a WAHM, I have to grab the time that I have to get my work done.
Sometimes, when we go on vacation, I’m busy live tweeting and Facebook’ing photos (never when we’re abroad as I can’t use my phone). Partly because I love to share, but also because I’m a social media business owner and travel writer and because I know that I am doing a service to the hosting accommodations. I try not to let the tech use interfere with our trip and keep it a minimum. But since I do it at home, it appears that I am taking attention away from my children. I don’t want to do that. Ever since I heard a statement that came out of the Disney Social Moms Conference (which I was not at, I read the tweets), that we only have 18 summers with our children, I am more aware of how precious our time with our children is. I look at my daughter, at age 9, and she is growing up so fast. Tonight she studied Ethiopia as part of her computer, and I had visions of her as a diplomat traveling the world to help people. Nine more years will go by in a blink and she will be leaving home. I don’t want her to remember me tweeting while on vacation. That is not the image I want to have as a mother who loves her children more than life.
So, this weekend was a wake-up call. We headed to the Adirondacks for a few days. Part of the trip was personal, part was business where I received a family press trip to experience a resort (more on our incredible time at 1000 Acres Ranch Resort in the next few days as I am still re-entering real life and getting caught up with my day time job). As the trip started, I manically tried to record my experiences, taking photos at every turn and tweeting when possible. As we headed further and further into the mountains, I lost reception and Wifi access became sporadic. But as I struggled to gain access, I found myself wasting precious moments with my children. We had a plethora of activities and beautiful surroundings to remind me of the fun I was missing. So, this time, instead of fighting the lack of access, I embraced it almost immediately, instead taking physical notes when I needed to, to prepare for my future articles but really experiencing every waking moment of our trip. We went horseback riding, we played shuffle boarding, we played volleyball in the pool, we made s’mores by a bonfire, we went canoeing as a family, my kids rode an actual tractor, they went to their first pig barbecue (not that we participated in eating it eating pork), we played with water balloons, we tossed eggs back and forth, we hiked up a tall mountain and my kids even took part in their first human rodeo. We had the time of our lives.
And me? I was there for everything. My phone sat in our room the entire time. I have a notebook full of our experiences and two cameras full of photos recording the happiest expressions I’ve ever seen on my children’s faces. And I was there for every smile.
How about you? Do you continue to tweet and blog while on vacation or do you put your gadgets away?
You’ve written before about the challenges of being on a press/blogger trip where the expectation is that you will be tweeting and connecting via social media, and how that juxtaposes with the need to spend quality time (it’s a trite expression that I hate, but yet I just used it) with your family. I struggle with that too. I was at Disney Social Media Moms and my daughter knew that during the trip I would be posting pictures on Facebook and checking in on foursquare, and that was ok. When we are not on that kind of a trip, I find it a little easier. I often just put my phone away and don’t look back.