I'm finally a Mommy Blogger!

There seems to be only two types of bloggers - Mommy bloggers and everyone else.  I'm in the "everyone else" group due to my severe lack of biological children. But with today's post, I get to move into the Mommy blogger category because today, my blog post is about my Mom. (Work with me, here....)

This Friday, my 83-year old mother will be joining the digital age when she gets internet access in her independent living apartment. OMG, my mom could potentially be on Facebook soon.

I doubt she'll be friending anyone in immediate future as this is the same women who required me to visit two weekends each year: the beginning of daylight savings time and the end of daylight savings time. It seems that I was the only one of her children who had the technical training for resetting all the digital clocks in her house. (oh, and don't lecture, I visit my mom more than twice a year.)

I know this will be an educational opportunity for me because I talk techie all the time and make assumptions that if I know it, everyone else must know it, too. I've already learned how much I take for granted in just trying to explain some Web 2.0 basics to my mom.

Recently, I was explaining how I left a note of sympathy on my home town newspaper's (Albert Lea Tribune) obituary page.  I explained, "I wrote a note to the family about my memories of their mom."

To anyone reading this blog, that would be simply enough. But how could someone who has never used the internet for communications, only to view things, understand writing on a website that doesn't belong to you? It took a bit of time to either explain it or get her flustered enough to stop asking questions - I'm not sure what the real outcome was.

Mom called me last night to discuss the selection of her email address. Could she really use whatever she wanted? More or less, yes. You tell them what you want for your user name (oops).

Explaining the "@" part and how she only chooses the part before the @, was a bit more tricky. "It's called an ampersand and it means 'at."

She wanted to know, "How did you get to have 'family' in your email address?"

"Mom, I didn't choose that part of my email address, I have 'usfamily' because that's the name of my ISP...um....service provider." (drats!) 

-silence-

So, ask yourself - ten or fifteen years ago, would you have understood this? 

This will definitely be a learning experience for me. And perhaps a very drawn-out learning experience. I'll just consider it fodder for having more Mommy blogger posts. (So I can be more like the other kids...) 

www.nataliedee.com