Cricket was recently using her laptop (a cheap netbook that I salvaged from being tossed at work that she and her brother share) – mostly to do her usual activities: play games on NickJr.com, watch episodes of the Pink Panther on Netflix, or practice typing in Word. But it seems she decided to be exploratory today. Now we have already had talks about how exploratory she is allowed to get (she has been burned on her own before watching YouTube videos – just because it has Elmo in it doesn’t make it kid-friendly), so I generally don’t worry that she will find anything she isn’t supposed to see (and filters are set as explicit as I can manage short of setting up site-filtering). But today she ventured in an unexpected direction – she Google’d herself.
Specifically she Google’d her name and the word family (I presume expecting to find information about her family or maybe our blogs or something – frankly I’m not entirely sure what she expected to find). What was really interesting is what she found – she found an old online journal page that I used to sporadically write on up until shortly after she was born. The last post I wrote on it actually was talking about her and her development so far (at that point being 8 months old), and then going on about how life-changing becoming a parent is.
I found myself reading through the old posts up there – I read the one about her to her before putting her to bed for the night, but then I came back and read the rest. And frankly I was pretty boring and kind of dumb back that (aside from my parenting revelations). The rest of my posts were indicative of how little I really had to say and how little I really had learned so far in life – mostly shallow introspection and occasionally misdirected frustration at things for which I had more control or responsibility than I took – that and some lame mixtape playlists and a weird attempt at poetry.
Anyway, I’ve strayed from my point (another thing I tended to do a lot … and probably still do now). After reading my post to my daughter, she asked if she could have her own website. At age 7 and a half she wants to start sharing her musings with the world. Considering the behavior model, I’m not surprised (I’ve been blogging amateurishly for a few years and my wife more successfully for a little longer). But alas I told her no, I’m not buying her her own website – which was a shock to her in itself, not that I said no but that there were costs involved. What I did agree to, however (assuming she remembers having the conversation) is that if she felt compelled to write somethings, she could post them on my blog. So don’t be surprised if you start seeing “Cricket’s Corner” posts in the near future … or not depending on whether it goes anywhere.