You may have noticed that I didn’t blog twice last week. Not even once. And that was because I was gone from home spending the week with my kids at Durley Family Camp.
This is the one thing that my kids look forward to each summer – spending a week in a cabin with many friends nearby in their cabins, a beach at the lake, late night games like Mission Impossible, and FREEDOM (in other words, they can run around all over the property with minimal parental involvement; as long as I know where they are going, they are good)!
I look forward to Family Camp for many of the same reasons that they do, lots of friends nearby to talk with, late night card games in the adults only party tent, and FREEDOM (in other words, no kids hanging on me in the 90+degree heat)!
We love getting to worship together each morning and evening (it takes the kids a couple of days to get used to sitting through the evening service, but Sean and Rebecca Gladding did a great job of involving the kids throughout the week using art). We love getting to eat together with one another and with all our friends, old and new, throughout the week. We love the campground and all the encounters with nature (although, being dive-bombed by cicadas was NOT my favorite.) It is just a wonderful week of play, fellowship, worship, and not much else.
One of the bonuses of this week – NO TV, NO DS, NO WHINING ABOUT BEING BORED. (Yes, there is some whining towards the end of the week when exhaustion sets in; but since the kids are usually not with me, I don’t have to listen to much, if any of it.)
And I made it the entire week without my laptop and without spending time on Facebook (with the exception of messaging one person for camp-related purposes).
So what did we do on Saturday when we were back home? The kids watched TV and played their DS games; I watched TV and gorged myself on Facebook.
I find it absolutely amazing that for an entire week, we didn’t miss electronics or media AT ALL (although my phone did come in handy checking radar a couple of times), but the minute we have access to it again, we are using it at the same rate that we were using it the week before camp.
The most interesting thing for me was that by having people around me to talk to, I didn’t feel the need to be on Facebook and have “pseudo” conversations with electronic forms of people. Real people were better. Real conversations filled me up. Immediate responses from people I love were more than enough. Getting to know someone through face to face conversation was real and genuine.
All that to say, I am not sure what to do with that realization except find ways to be with real people more often. And in the real world of busy schedules that is hard, but needed and necessary.
How would you handle an entire week without technology? What would you miss the most?