Today was another friend of mine's birthday. He wanted to keep it fairly low key as he had already done a lot of celebrating over the weekend. We decided to go somewhere to get some food and watch the Monday Night Football game (which my favorite team, the Eagles, lost by giving up two touchdowns in the final 4 minutes but I digress). I wasn't sure exactly what time we were going to be leaving work to go out, so I opened my IM account so that I could check with him to see. Imagine my surprise as I looked through my contact list to see who was online and lo and behold, my daughter had signed up for an account and was online. Talk about growing up too fast. She's 11 years old now, but has now taken one more step towards those dreaded teenage years. It's always a shock when something like that wakes me up to the fact that my kids are growing up, but I think this time was a little worse than normal because of the reminiscing I've been doing about when she was a baby.
I'm not complaining. In fact I'm quite excited about it. It's one more way for me to be in touch with my kids. They live in Salt Lake City while I'm here in Las Vegas. I sat and chatted with her for about a half hour. I made sure I went over the fact that she wasn't to be talking with just anyone online, and that she needed to have either myself or her mother approve any contacts that she added to her list. I try to be the responsible dad, even though it gets difficult when I live so far away and don't know what the kids are up to all the time (and that I'm not all that responsible myself).
I guess the point is (if there really is a point to all this) that no matter how much I wish my kids could just stay little and fun forever, they're going to grow up. My only hope is that it isn't so fast that I end up missing it.
2 comments:
Thanks for your post. I'm actually surprised that anyone's even read this by now. I do appreciate the clarification, and hope that I am choosing one of the many good effective ways of being a father.
Just make sure someone monitors her. Kaila's friend was chatting with, and giving her cell phone number to a 26-year old guy the other day. She met him through MySpace.com. I had to create an account, find his comments to her, and send him a nice email stating he needed to stop being a pedophile, stop emailing teenage girls, or risk the chance of ending up in prison as a child molestor. Too much fun. My daughter Brittany has been caught on several occasions by myself chatting with strange men in the early morning hours (she gets insomnia, so now I take the DSL cable at night). I work with sex offenders for 20 hours a week and know that they really exploit young children through internet chat rooms and instant messaging services. Doom and Gloom!! Doom and Gloom!! Doom and Gloom!! Doom and Gloom!! Doom and Gloom!! Doom and Gloom!! But really, it is scary!!!
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