The Plague

I was late to the smart phone thing. I knew that once I got one, it would be my life, so I put it off as long as I could. I managed to not be a regular cell phone user until 2010. That's when I finally got text messaging (people thought I was so weird for not having text messaging. I was weird. I just didn't know it until I could text. Then a whole new world opened up to me). I got my first iPhone in 2016. Sure enough, it's my life now.

(I did the same thing with WiFi. We didn't have WiFi until my second semester of school in 2015. I didn't know it was weird to not have WiFi until a friend asked me for my WiFi password one day, and I laughed and said, "We don't have WiFi." Then I had to pick her jaw up off the floor).

Now smart phones and WiFi rule my life - as I knew they eventually would. The other day I was thinking about the biblical plagues and how they would affect us now. God could sent locusts and hail, and we would just stay inside and eat food from cans and be just fine. He could turn a river to blood, and we'd sit around watching hours of YouTube footage of it. He could send frogs, and we'd make make frog memes.

A true plague for our day would be taking out the WiFi.

Anyway, now that I'm almost "with the times" (fashionably, I'm stuck in 2005) I have an iPhone, and I have WiFi, but I've tried to be selective about apps. My first phone had such small storage that I could only have 3-5 apps at a time, so I had to be pretty choosy. Now I have a much bigger phone, so I can have all sorts of apps that I never even use. I've tried to steer clear of games because I hoped that doing so would keep my kids from being obsessed with my phone.

It didn't. They're obsessed with it no matter what.

I caved a while back and put a couple of PBS Kids apps on my phone and a color by number game. Since school started, I've been letting my girls play the games while I do their hair - it's the only way it gets done. But it has also created monsters out of them. They ask for my phone from the moment they wake up each morning, and I think, "How did this happen?" I want there to be some balance. I don't mind a little technology use in the home - in fact, I think it's important so they can learn some of the positive and productive uses for it - but for some reason, allowing them ten minutes on my phone each day has made them into crazy people.

At 6:30 this morning, I clicked on a link to a video, and every single one of my kids heard it and got out of bed and came running to my phone. Then it began...

"Can I play on your phone?"

"Can I play on your phone?"

"Can I play on your phone?"

Frankly, this reaction terrifies me. But that's not what I want to blog about today. What I'm here to confess is that a couple of weeks ago, I did something wild and crazy and put Candy Crush on my phone. Not for my kids, of course. For me! I played it a long time ago on someone else's phone when it first came out (that's what kept me busy during Ragnar in 2013), but I've never had it on my own phone.

I have to admit, I have no idea what's going on in Candy Crush. I get the candy swapping thing - that's simple enough. What I don't get is why I am feeding dragons, pulling bunnies out of mud, and wearing helmets. There is so much going on in that game, and I don't know what any of it means. I'm earning crowns and gold bars. Sometimes I get stars. Occasionally I spin a wheel, and sometimes I get to open a treasure box or a gift. I only recently realized that the skinny red things are not hot dogs. I mean, I get that it's CANDY Crush, but they've always been hot dogs to me.

I've been hiding from my kids so I can play Candy Crush. Don't judge me.

This, of course, is one more reason I've avoided games on my phone. I don't want to get sucked in.

But the candies!! I need to swap them!!

So I guess I need to keep an assortment of candies in my food storage so I can make it through the plague.