I don't like to admit that I have a problem--(I can quit anytime!)--but I'm afraid it's true.

I am addicted to the Internet.

Facebook, blogs, e-mail, the ability to look up any random bit of information I want at any time I want to (movie times! Weather! Addresses! phone numbers! It's all online.) The Internet is my friend, people. I need it. 

Or I like to think I do, anyway.

And yet, somehow I survived going dark for three whole days last week and lived to tell the tale. Going dark--that's what my friend Jessica calls surviving-without-the-net. Because when you turn off that connection, it's like you're dropping off the grid...existing in some no-man's-land where the only way anyone can get in touch with you is via the telephone. Or (gasp!) an actual face to face conversation.

As I mentioned before, the girls and I went to stay with Eric in a hotel for a few days while he worked on a job in Beaverton. We finished our Christmas shopping, we went to see Christmas lights, we went out to dinner, we played in the hotel pool. It was a lovely time, really. Except for this one little factor--the hotel charged ten dollars a day for Internet access. Is that outrageous or what? I couldn't believe it! And then, even if I had wanted to pay that exorbitant rate for the entire time we were there, I couldn't, because our laptop died. (Died...or was murdered. Eric found what appeared to be candy shoved into the insides of the machine. No one has admitted to the crime, but either way, it's gone now).

So there I was, stuck in a hotel with three kids and no Internet! What would I ever do?

I'll tell you what I did. I actually played with my kids. I also used maps--physical maps--to find my way to things. And the telephone to call places for information, or to get in touch with people. Or I just drove around, relying on my sense of direction and general knowledge of the city, to assume I'd find what I was looking for. And you know what? I did. With no problems whatsoever.


One afternoon while Evie was napping and the two older girls had already watched as much Nickelodeon on the hotel TV as I could handle, we found ourselves with nothing much to do. And so I pulled out the pack of tiny toys I'd brought with us, and we played with them. We used random things from the hotel room to create a world for some princesses, a unicorn, and a lego man to inhabit--a box of crackers for a house, the hotel ice bucket for a swimming pool, the coffee table as a mountain. It was a lot like what I remembered as a kid, when I used my shoes as cars for my Barbies and pretended that the tall lamp next to my Dad's old recliner was a skyscraper that they lived in. It also gave me a little peek into the funny, creative things going on inside my kids' heads. They say the darnedest things when they're playing imaginary games with each other. (Lucy, upon seeing Beth: "So, we meet again, Evil Enchantress.")


I admit, the adventures of Sunflower Princess and her gang got boring to me after awhile--my tolerance for playtime is not quite as great as my kids' is, which probably why I hardly ever sit down and play with them like that--and probably why they love it sooooo much when I do. After awhile, I left them to play alone while I read my book. And then Evie woke up from her nap and we all went to Red Robin.

But that afternoon of hotel playtime was a fun memory to make--and one I never would have made if I had the Internet to entertain me. I'm sure of it. I would have been Facebooking, or blogging, or looking up turn-by-turn directions from the hotel to the Christmas light display, or finding out the exact hours of the stores I wanted to shop at, or other supposedly critical information that I *had* to spend my afternoon looking up.

So...the lesson here is less Internet = more face time with my kiddos. Maybe, just maybe, that's something I need to keep in mind when I think about how I want my new year to be.