Savvy Saving Mom, Unplugged!

Yesterday morning started as usual, getting up at 6:30 am, making breakfast for my husband and 16 yr. old daughter and packing lunch for my hubs for later in the afternoon. After watching them pull out of the driveway to go start their days at school and work, I turned and walked back into the house to start mine, where I was greeted by my 12 yr. old son with a frantic, "Mom! The internet isn't working on my computer!"

What? Your wire must be loose or something. No? Check the modem! All connections are fine. Now I start to get a little frantic because my internet isn't working either. I called our cable/phone/internet company where I am informed of a 'widespread outage'. You just increased our services by another $6 a month on top of already outrageous fees and you're telling me that your services are down? Where is all of that extra money going exactly? You guys aren't having any conferences in Hawaii or anything like that in the near future, are you? (Well, I have to wonder!) So services are down with no inkling of when they will be restored. Now we can officially panic.

My 12 yr. old son and 14 yr. old daughter are homeschooled and all of their lessons and curriculum are on-line. I am on-line every day, too. I Twitter, I blog, I read other blogs, I Twitter (oh, did I already say that?). Well, I need to use the internet also..... I'm sitting at the computer chewing my nails in a nervous fit, my eyes darting back and forth like an addict who doesn't know when they'll get their next fix every time I hit the refresh button and nothing happens. My morning has had a monkey wrench thrown at it and I can't regroup without my internet fix. Wow, I realized just how unhealthy some habits can become. I know life has evolved in such a way that we actually do need the internet for certain things, but the sad thing was, I reeeeaaaallllly neeeeeeded it! Whoa!

Enter my 12 yr. old, trying not to get in the way of my pacing. "Mom, you want to play cards or something?" Really? We don't have a power outage, just an internet outage. I figured he would watch something on TV until our day became normal again. But, no. Who's the parent and who's the child here? I immediately felt the 'bad parent' roll for not having his idea first. After being snapped out of my 'no internet brain warp', I became human again and jumped at the opportunity to play cards with my son.

I hadn't had cards in my hand for a long time, and it was a game that he was teaching me. I quickly forgot about what I was currently missing on the computer, and thought to myself instead, about what I had been missing with my child. We played for 2 1/2 hours, laughed, shared blueberry muffins, and vowed that we would make this a weekly event.

Our services must have come back up while we were engaged in our card game, but neither one of us ever asked the other "Do you think the internet is back?". Although my son sheepishly admitted that he was happy not to have to go straight to his studies yesterday morning, he did say that if he'd had an on-line WOW (World of Warcraft) match scheduled, that he would have been just as freaked out as I was!

On my internet habit? Too much of any one thing is usually not good, unless it's time well spent with your kids!