The director sweetly replied “oh it’s nothing, it’s ok.”

I turned and took Myers to the toddler classroom, got him situated and began to make my way back toward the front of the building.  Upon my second pass, the teachers were now huddled around the sink, jousting with plastic cups and some unknown adversary.

My natural chivalrous nature kicked in and I walked toward the scuttle.  Identifying the culprit as a rather large periplaneta americana, I pulled some paper towels from the dispenser, discretely “took care of it” and then disposed of the offending intruder in the thrash.  My aplomb at handling the extraction was such that the little ones had no idea of what just went down.  The teachers were thankful and gracious.  I felt like a prince.

“It’s funny”  the director said, “boogers, pee and poop, no problem. Bugs, ehhhhh!”

If you have ever been into a child care facility, you know there are lots of the offending trinity mentioned above that these fine folks deal with them everyday.  And let’s be honest, while your own child’s scatelogical output is not overly offending, the output of other people’s children is just down right gross.

So I salute all the wonderful people who care for our youngest of children while moms’ and dads’ nation wide go about the task of making a living.

But I especially salute those kind folks at Stepping Stone School who lovingly nurture and care for my own child Myers each and everyday.

One of the most difficult things a parent faces is leaving a child in the care of another, especially the littlest ones.  But because I know  that Myers is happy, safe and immersed in a fun and supportive learning environment it is not really difficult to walk out the door and into my day.

When Mom or I return in the afternoon to pick him up, he almost always has had a good day.

So thank you ladies, you are doing great work and I really appreciate that.

Slaying an errant water bug is the least I could do!

Now this post is sponsored by the Motorola Droid RAZR smartphone and while there might not appear to be immediate ties between Motorola and my youngest child’s pre-k school, I believe synergies do exist.

That would be the pursuit of excellence.

Indeed Motorola has a long history of pursuing excellence.  Harken back to their trail blazing work in the mid 90’s when they engineered the “flip phone” and ‘”clam phone.”     Remember those?  It’s amazing to compare the old flip and the new Droid RAZR.  We have come along way.

And Stepping Stone School pursues excellence everyday in nurturing and caring for the littlest ones among us.

Thus it’s really the same, whether you are choosing electronics or child care, choose excellence.

So there you have it.  A blog about poop, pee, boogers, bugs and phones!

You don’t see that everyday.

The standard answer here is pretty easy. Because of the provisions of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA), any site that collects personal information cannot offer services to customers under 13 years of age. As a result, almost any popular web site has clear terms of service that state that nobody under 13 can have an account — notably Facebook, Google, and iTunes.

Not that most people pay close attention to that.

So, of all the possible accounts, iTunes makes me the most nervous — all digital music does — a consequence of growing up when an album collection was a tangible thing. I live in constant fear that I’m going to suddenly and irrevocably delete my whole music library.

For my son, it’s the logical place to start giving him some ownership of his own digital life because that is where he has made the greatest investment (for my daughter it a was a Nook attached to her own B&N account, but that’s another post).

Until now, Bubba has used Home Share to move songs from my library to his (aging, highly restricted) white iMac. From there he has synched the songs, first to iPods, then to his hand-me-down iPhone.

I was worried that in the process of creating the new account I would: delete his existing library forcing him to reload everything, delete my library forcing me to jump off a high building, break his computer, break my computer, and destroy the internet. I admit, the music stuff makes my jumpy.

Setting up the account had a few twists and turns, but we got it done. We used his school email and my credit card to create the account, and pretty quickly got his computer iTunes and his iPhone switched over to the new account and synched. The songs he had imported via Home Share from my library didn’t disappear, and the internet didn’t break.

He knows that I will see any purchases he makes on my credit card statement, but the whole move is premised on trust that he will use this access wisely.

One minor headache — his older model iMac is not compatible with OSX Lion, so no iCloud on his desktop. A pain because he wanted access to the calendar that I keep of his sporting events. Our workaround — the shared calendars do appear on his iPhone, so he just tracks that info there.

A couple of months into the arrangement, I still feel pretty good about it. I expected to be peppered with requests for permission to buy music. Not so much. He mostly listens to Pandora. Instead he’s used the account to acquire quite a few free apps. This flies under my radar because I’m not being charged anything. And there are plenty of free apps that could help him to avoid restrictions or controls that I have set up (limited calls and texts, for example).

So I still have to ask him to turn over the phone from time to time, so I can have a look at the apps. Not ideal, but part of the process.

Do you have thoughts about the age at which you will begin turning over the digital controls to your kids?

Because I said so.

But have you ever considered your relationship to “because I said so?”

Is it a trusty club in your golf bag that you know you can always hit straight?

Or is it an ugly driver’s license photo, something embarrassing that you are forced to produce regularly in public?

Is it a tactic that would be upheld by the Supreme Court, or endorsed by the CIA?

Does “because I said so” plant your standard proudly snapping in the breeze atop the high ground, or does send up a ragged white flag of defeat?

Could you go a whole year without “because I said so?” A whole childhood? Should you?

I am contemplating the place “because I said so” has in my life because I have a tween who loves soccer. And a sister is who is getting married.

“She’s already married,” my soccer player correctly points out.

“True, but that was a small private ceremony, and this party is for all the friends.”

“But Aunty lives in California. Why is the party in Dallas?”

“It’s for Grandma and Grandpa’s friends, too.”

“They live in Marble Falls.”

I can feel “because I said so” welling up inside me.

“Can I sleep over at a teammate’s house? They invited me.”

“No.”

“Why?”

The moment of truth. A teachable moment, no less. One in which we could talk about the meaning of family — the joys and also the obligations that come with it. The place of sacrifice. And why even The Big Tournament is sometimes less important that a cocktail buffet 200 miles away, populated by people you’ve never met.

Or I could just go with Old Faithful and save myself a lot of verbiage.

*****

After about an hour at the reception, it becomes clear to my soccer player that there will be no DJ, jugglers, foam pit or fog machines. Genuine puzzlement ensues.

“Is this really what adults do for fun?”

“Yes.”

“Hunh. Well, can I at least have another piece of cake?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I said so.”

This post brought to you by Motorola Razr

And we’re giving one away on the live show, this Wednesday at 3pm ET — so tune in!

Yes I cleaned it up!

It appears that lots of sugar and the anxious excitement generated by partaking in a covert operation like toilet papering a house late at night puts adolescent boys into a hyper agitated state.

Who knew?

These boys were jacked up like firecrackers!

Having run out of planned activities and hoping to quell the WWE Smack Down going on inside the tent in the backyard, I had to come up with something.

Luckily Motorola had sent DadLabs a number of Droid RAZR phones for us to use in a Mother’s Day shoot.  They had just arrived the day before so I had access to multiple phones.  These were the sleek new RAZR’s pre-loaded with multiple apps and games.  The folks at Motorola touted their durability and scratch resistance so I decided to test these claims, as well as give this wild bunch of grade schoolers a 30-minute cool down period before calling lights out. For a digital midnight snack each kid got to play on a phone, as long as they were quiet and remained on their sleeping bag.

The boys were delighted and settled into a nice mellow gaming mode and the phones held up well in the hands of 9 year olds.  But the thing that amazed me the most was the ability of these boys to navigate the user interface of the phone.  None of these kids have phones and yet they were able to manipulate the device as easily as I do, and I have Droid!

Certainly some of this can be attributed to the simplicity of the Droid platform, but I felt something else was going on.

And then it hit me!

We truly are raising a generation that will blow our minds with the things they will create using technology.  As Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in the his book “Outliers,” it takes approximately 10,000 hours of doing a specific task or activity to become truly elite and an expert in that field.  Up to now, very few folks get to the 10,000 hour mark in any pursuit and usually it is not until much later in life.  Furthermore, there almost always exists some anomaly in an environment that allows an individual to log such hours in practice of a certain task. One of Gladwell’s examples is Bill Gates, who had voluminous and constant access to computers in his early teen years.

But as technology becomes ubiquitously embedded within our daily lives, our children will reach this threshold much earlier than any previous generation.  There will be lots of little Bill Gates running around.

So just imagine what wonders this “techxpert”  generation will create with the expertise they develop.  I am not sure we can fathom the pace of change that is about to occur.

This epiphany also helped me realize the extreme importance of teaching our kids the value of a balanced life.  All tech all the time is not a full life and as technology becomes ingrained in the day to day we must consciously work toward introducing and enjoying the no tech part of existence.  While not a completely new task of parenting, monitoring screen time is becoming more of an issue.

In this high tech world one of our crucial jobs as parents will be to do things like modeling strong personal relationships, stressing the importance of the act of just visiting face to face and introducing the wonder of the natural world to our kids.

After the 30 minutes of game time had passed the boys were calmed, I gathered the phones, declared lights out and sat on the deck and listened to increasingly waning conversation and giggles until all the fellas drifted off to sleep.  It took about 15 minutes.  Not bad, from pure pandemonium to deep sleep in the span of 45 minutes!

And as I sat there listening to snores and distant coyote calls I considered our new duty as parents and was pleased with the balance of life that had been achieved on this evening.  The boys really enjoyed the technology of laser games and Droid phones and they reveled in the camaraderie and excitement of toilet papering a cousin’s front yard.  But I imagined they really dug falling asleep, in a tent, in their buddies backyard listening to the soft gentle sounds of the woods at night and being 9 years old.

Our kids will amaze us with the technology they will create as we grow older; let’s make sure we amaze them with the simple things in life.

Disclosure:  Motorola provided all of the phones used during the evening and purchased additional Mother’s Day video content from DadLabs.com.  But the idea to toilet paper our cousin’s house was all mine!