Parenting skills at their finest!

   A recent stroll down memory lane had me looking at photos of my daughter from over the years.

A number of things went through my head...

When the heck did this kid get so tall? She is now about as tall as me!

Will I ever be able to keep up with her pant size?

What is her pant size these days?

Are those pants she is wearing in the picture?

How did she come to own so many cool shoes?

Will she notice if I start borrowing her shoes?

   But mostly I wondered, how did we make it this far?  How did she survive with us as parents? After all, we are the ones who decided having children might not be so bad after someone had come to visit with their well behaved children. Suddenly having little ones seemed like a good idea. Parents we knew didn't seem all that more skilled than us, so how hard could it be? Oh, to be sooo naive.

refusing to do slide

   Now mind you, we weren't totally clueless when it came to children. We had been around lots of youngsters. Tended to lots of kid of all ages. And all them in our care had survived. Even the ones that sometimes didn't behave very well. We felt we knew quite a bit about kids. We could totally handle this!
 
   After our daughter was born, one of our first hurdles was the park. We knew kids liked parks. So early on, we took our daughter to the park. At first, she didn't seem to like it very much. She wouldn't sit in the swing. She didn't climb the monkey bars. She totally refused to do the slide. We were both kinda baffled by this, as the children we had encountered seemed to like swings, monkey bars and especially slides. We wondered if the problem was the park we had chosen. Later we learned that it was a wardrobe issue. We had not dressed her in the right outfit for a park outing!

Silly us!

     Our vast experience had also taught us that children liked cars. So we got her one.

   But then, next thing we knew, she wanted a space in the garage. We had no idea that driving was going to be such a struggle at such an early age! As if it were not bad enough that our yard had grown enough plastic items for an army of kids and our house was overrun with toys, now our garage was being taken over by the smallest member of our family!
 
   We were in the process of adding her to our auto insurance when someone mentioned to us that kids aren't supposed to drive, at least not until they are sixteen or so. We began to wonder if this applied to other things....

Like navigating commercial boats?

It was the captain's idea to let a two year old pilot a boat full of passengers.

   Or driving a horse and buggy carriage?

Hey, she was five...

Look how well she handled the reins!

   Certainly we thought letting her fly and airplane was a good idea...

Well, the pilot thought so, and if he was okay with her flying his plane, so were we!

   We were even game for her flying without a plane...

Don't be so shocked. It's not like we let her jump out of an airplane or anything!

   After all, we wanted our daughter to experience many things. Though it became evident that our "vast" experience had not quite taught us all we probably needed to know to be good parents, we did not give up in our efforts. It became our mission to involve her in all the activities that we enjoyed, like hiking and biking, boating, and camping. 

What can go wrong when you got a cool carrier like this?

   Well, I suppose there was that one time when we got to the top of the mountain and she wanted out to stretch. While she was stretching with Daddy, I took some pictures. Well I thought she was stretching with Daddy. He thought she was playing with me, so he was video-taping. And getting bored, she decided that she would climb over the railing for a better look. Oops. Thank you stranger who had her by the shirt! We felt pretty foolish!

   But not foolish enough to stop us years later from visiting Mt. Rushmore. At night. With an electrical storm heading our way....  Perhaps that was a questionable decision. I had to admit when the fireman's walkie-talkie started spouting warnings, I did get a little nervous. Maybe it is just us and mountains. We probably should stay out of the mountains. Otherwise, we seem to make pretty good decisions as parents. 

Take hiking for example. She started at an early age.

Clothes optional, of course. Although we generally insisted on shoes.

   Well, usually...

And if she got too tired to hike, we were right there to help her out!

Don't worry, I got her.

I think.

Maybe I should not mention our adventures in biking and climbing and boating...
Which brings me back to my original question, how did she survive? How did we get this far?

Perhaps it was the helping hands we received... There were a myriad of wonderful people who helped us along the way. Some a little younger, true.... But we were not quick to judge experience based on size. Our nephew was a great babysitter.

Or maybe it was the new people we met along the way (Kate was good at introductions, as well as stealing hats). These folks had tons of experience traveling with kids and gave us some terrific advise that we used for years!

   Then again, it could have been the emergency response teams that have entered our lives...

   I like to think some of how we arrived at the present was our parenting skills. We were adamant about giving her tasks early on, instilling a sense of responsibility at an early age. It could be she grew into the young woman she is today because we helped her develop the skills she needed.

   

Or possibly it was that we were relaxed in our way of handing things and from us she learned how to relax and take it all in.

  Then again,  it may not have been our parenting skills at all.

Who is driving the buggy?

  However we arrived at this place and time, I thank God. I pray that he continues to help us in our journey as our daughter continues to develop and grow.

   I also pray that she doesn't notice that we are pretty much the same shoe size...

Due to technical difficulties...

   Note to self: If you are going to throw a computer out the door, make sure the door is open!

   Last week it was an over-abundance of conflicting and confusing email addresses and apps. This week, the list grows. In my effort to pare down my numerous emails, it appears that I somehow have managed to create another one. I don't really know how I did it, but I did! Since it is linked up to some of my vital accounts, I am reluctant to try and undo whatever it is that I did.

   If I only knew what I did in the first place.

   Still in the throes of email woes (I like how that rhymes), I have discovered a troubling new technology issue, one more vital than my emails. My calendar stopped sharing and syncing. I like to call it "That Syncing Feeling," but perhaps it is better described as "That Non-Syncing Feeling." It is not sharing well with others. Heck, it is not sharing well with my own devices. Whatever you call it, my calendars are failing kindergarten.

    I noticed it today when I added an event on my phone. There seemed to be a new calendar category. I hadn't created one. Could it have come from a recent update on my phone? Might it be a product of my mysterious email creation? All I know is I added an event on what appeared to be an empty day.

   That should have been my tip off that something was very, very wrong. Empty days simply don't exist as far as the calendar goes. Unless you are looking at a date in 2021, but even as far out as that may seem, there are events on the books. I can only surmise that I am very thick.

   So fast forward to later in the day while I was working on my computer and received an alert notification for a reminder I had scheduled on one of my calendars. When I went to the calendar to peruse the details, I was distracted by the amount of days that had no events. None. Not even the one I had entered earlier in the day.

   That couldn't be right.

  I looked at my phone, I looked at the computer. I looked at the phone again. Nope, they didn't match. So I started to investigate. I have a few different calendars (all through the same service), some of which I make public, and some of which I keep private. Because who really needs to know when I had my period or when my last mammogram was, right? None of my calendars seemed  to be syncing properly due to the addition of a new email on an existing account that I didn't really want. All the stuff that had been entered back when there was only ONE email still showed in both places, but the new stuff entered after the accidental technology tourist when traveling and created an additional identity, well, it appeared here OR there.

   This clearly wasn't going to work. Not only do I rely on being able to pull up my calendar on multiple devices during my day, but my calendar was synced to other users for cleaner scheduling purposes. Just as I am synced to other individuals calendars for the same reason. If I were not syncing properly with myself, was I syncing properly with others?

Did I just say what I think I said?

  I would throw all this in the kitchen sink and start from scratch right now, but it would take me into the kitchen, and there we have a large appliance that no longer works to keep food cold and is now serving as a cabinet that lights up when you open the doors. I am so not going in the kitchen, not even to put all this technology down the drain and turn on the garbage disposal, no matter how tempted I might be.

   The only answer to my problem was to slog through the bog of technology and see if I could figure out the answer to my latest challenge. The Internet suggested trying another app, but I didn't want to do that. I had previously been quite successful with the apps I had! After tentatively trying a few things on my own (like adding calendars, deleting newly made calendars, changing which calendar I applied to an event) I broke down and did another search on the Internet. I determined that I did have the sync option on, that I was hooked to WI-FI on all my devices, and that I was signed in to my primary account on all my devices. Google(tm) is usually one of my best friends, but I was disappointed to find that either my search was too weak, worded incorrectly, or I was the only person in the entire universe having this problem. 

It isn't easy being techno-challenged.

   Via my education through the help center,  I came to the deduction that the addition of an email address to my account should not have affected my account syncing whatsoever. Except that it did. I would attach the picture of myself making nasty faces at my computer, but that was when I discovered that my issues also extended to my photos syncing between devices. Or rather, not syncing. 

   Gosh, thank heavens I don't have anything else to do...like work on the remodel of our kitchen (because that is what you are supposed to do when one appliance breaks down), or wash the clothes, or pay the bills, or run some errands, or (gasp) work on my writing. It would take me some time to straighten out this mess.

   I started with my smarter than me phone. I made sure that in each app I used, my new and improved email address now embedded in my primary account, was set up for syncing. I then repeated the process with each device, checking out each of the individual apps for compliance, continually fighting the urge to light a match and test it out on the technology. My final result: I was now syncing smoothly. At least with myself.

   As to whether I will be in sync with other people, that has yet to be tested. 

What's app'ing ere?

   Earlier this week I was supposed to be working on an entry for my Monday blog spot that I call Monday Musings. It is meant to be a lighthearted way to start my week and get into the swing of writing so that I meet my weekly goals. Instead, I was busy screwing up my email. In my usual style, I did this in a big kind of way.

   Like many other technology users, I tend to use multiple devices. It is not unusual in the span of one day for me to use a smartphone, laptop, tablet and possibly a second computer. Much of my usage depends on where I am located, if other users in my house need a particular device (yes, we share technology devices in our house) or what the task is I wish to complete. For some tasks, I prefer to use one device over another for ease of use. I generally use my laptop or the other computer when writing because I like the keyboards for typing. I like to use the tablet when wasting time researching on Pintrest. My phone is the device of choice when utilizing my calendar.

   However, for other tasks, I use whatever technology I can get my hands on. With the development of mobile sites and apps, this should be easy, right? Well, not exactly. Facebook(tm) seems to provide a pretty seamless experience between computers, smart phones and other electronic devices, however, my current email platform is not this fluid. Our school websites do not provide this seamless experience either, though they are good about taking suggestions and implementing them. Although I enjoy Facebook(tm), it is primarily for me to stalk my friends and family relax and fool around. Email and school websites, on the other hand, are essential tools. Between those two platforms alone, I almost look and feel as if I have it all together.

   Since the school was taking steps to make their website and mobile platforms provide the same user experience, I decided that I could do the same with my email. I had become frustrated with the current provider I was using because the apps for my various devices behaved badly and did not have the same capabilities that the website versions did. For instance, the apps tended to capture my emails on whatever device I was using, making it impossible for me to call up the same email on another device, even though I had not deleted that correspondence, or filed it away in a folder. The app did not allow me to access pictures I had saved on a cloud. Sometimes the app was not good about attaching documents either. Worse yet, the app version of my email provider did not have a feature to select a group from my contact list. Apparently this is not a problem for Apple users, but I am not an Apple user for other reasons. And I send a lot of group emails. Entering each email address individually is time consuming (even with simply selecting the name from the contacts list) and using this method increases the chance of missing someone who should have been included. That takes away from my appearance of having it all together.

   

   Intending to simplify my email dilemma, I decided to try and switch to a provider I thought would make things easier to manage. As I began the process, I learned a lot about myself.

1. I was not as tech savvy as I liked to believe I was.
2. I have the patience of a two year old chipmunk.
3. I was a cyber hoarder!

   Me, a hoarder. How could that be? I was so embracing minimalism!

   

   I found that I had no less than six email addresses. Six! These six were spread out over four different providers. Three of these provider platforms had various folders in which to store "important" emails in case they need to be referenced for future use. I did not want to spend any time moving individual emails or contacts to my new provider, so I looked at having the new provider do it for me.

  

   Deceived by the simplicity of the instructions for importing my email addresses to the new provider that I had chosen, I opted to allow the system to automatically import my emails. It took five minutes longer than I wanted. But in the end, it did the job and moved my emails. All of my emails. Including the emails I had sorted into folders just in case I needed them in the future. All moved into one gigantic inbox. Without particular order, like grouping by email threads or grouping by date or grouping by anything. It had the folders listed too, with all the emails inside them as well, but no way to delete the email from the new giant inbox without deleting the said saved email from the folder as well. I had no idea how I was going to sort through all this crap. Happily it appeared that my contacts had transferred smoothly. Forging ahead, I pushed the tremendous email sorting task aside for later and put together a group email to send out. Only to discover that the new provider app did not actually have the ability to do so. When I had researched, all the information I read indicated that the app could send emails to groups. But no, I needed a second app for that!

   Not to be deterred, I loaded the second app on my favorite mobile device. Fortunately I had already spent countless hours cleaning up my phone so that I would have the memory to do so. I could now send the group email from my mobile device, but only after I recreated the groups that I wanted. There was no way to transfer my groups from my old provider contact list. 

   Needing to get some work done, I copied the text of my email, powered up a computer, pulled up the website for the old email provider, and logged in so I could send out the group message. To my surprise, I discovered that my old inbox was now filled with every email that I had ever read, sent or stored. Duplicates of the emails now in the inbox were also in their assigned folders. It looked just like my new email provider inbox.

I am convinced that Satan is an email program developer.

   With the help of my assistant, I began to cull through the giant inbox. It became evident that I was

Chirp, my assistant

keeping a great deal more email in folders than I was ever going to reference in the future. Thank heavens Chirp is good with the delete key. After hours of work and quite a bit of colorful language I am sure I have taught the bird to swear. Together we cleaned out all the unnecessary emails from all the inboxes and folders.

   Chirp reminded me that I was working toward minimalism, and encouraged me to carry this into my digital world. So I deleted some of the email addresses I had accumulated. Hopefully they are not connected to anything important. I am sure my future as a spy has been ruined, but my mental stability may have been saved. I was on the verge of removing all old addresses and changing to just using one new address when I remembered what happened when I changed to a new cell phone number. I gave my old cell number to my daughter and contacted everyone in my contact list with the change. Years later, some folks are STILL calling my old number.

   Having spent all my time this week managing my technology I am still trying to figure out how technology is a great time saving tool. I imagine there is an app for that, but it probably lacks the features that it needs to actually be effective.