Keeping in touch

by Patti Dickinson

Eight kids, a mom and a dad, and two spouses. Six geographical cities represented. All part of an email experiment. In the past, I have sent group emails to my college kids, and then the ones that are married with kids get individual emails. The kids still at home get no emails unless it is to say, "I guess you are not planning on having a weekend.....unless/until that train wreck of a room of yours is cleaned up first. And we are going to use my definition of clean, not yours." Not too sure why this method of communicating got started, but this week, I decided to shake things up. One massive group email. If everyone hit "reply all", this would be a terrific way to keep in touch.

We got off to a stutter start. Claire got a little too excited telling me the story about how she had two people over for dinner the night before, cooked a nice roast, and after dinner decided it would be a good time to do the self-clean oven routine. Long story short, the oven caught on fire, because of the grease that was on the bottom of the oven because the aluminum pan she was using had a tear in it (she wondered why she didn't have many drippings for gravy.....) The fire department came (I never did hear what they had to do to put out the fire) because the highlight of the evening was that my three year old grandson Ben got to sit in the fire truck with a fireman hat on, turning the steering wheel from side to side, etc. He got an invitation to come by the station sometime. (Bet that's on the schedule for today!)

The upshot here is that within twelve hours, every one of my kids had responded. And not in a vacuum. Responded to what had been said by the other siblings....

This is a new phase.....and I am still adjusting. The house is not as full anymore. Not full of voices, not full of laundry, not full of the remnants of a kid-cooked meal of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese --- orange powder on the counter and little orange crescents in the sink. Now we stay in touch differently. But I guess the mom in this picture is a little bit transparent. Needing to hear from the nest of kids who grew up under this roof...needing a quick snapshot of what their lives look like at this moment in time.

Yup. One content mom.