My alarm goes off in the mornings each day. Sometimes it’s my alarm, mostly it’s my children, but either way, I’m alerted to the fact that morning has arrived and it’s time to get up and get my day started. It was this morning that I realized my mornings have changed from years ago in a way I would not only have not expected, but would have been completely against had you asked me some years ago.
The first part would be the having to get up each and every day of the week to wakeful, buoyant, happy and/or whining and complaining children. That, I’m accustomed to and it doesn’t bother me at all. What’s changed that I wouldn’t have expected is that each morning, one of the first things I do—typically while I’m still in bed—is read my email.
There are several very nice technological advancements that have made this not the arduous task it once was. The first way is my iphone/iPad. It is both easy and convenient to pick up my iPad from my nightstand, notice the little ‘7’ red circle on the email icon and know without doing anything else that I have seven unread emails. The user interface for reading emails is quick and easy as well as comprehensive—showing the same graphical detail and information as I would otherwise see on my computer. And it’s right there on my nightstand taking me only a few minutes to scan or read them so I know what’s happened since last night when I read the last emails of the day before going to bed.
The other thing that’s made email so much less of a burdensome task is spam blocking and filtering. I’m using Gmail, although other email services offer similar features, and the amount of email I don’t have to “handle” is dramatically reduced. Categories of emails are sorted together and bulk deletion is simple and quick.
In the mornings these days I even pick up my phone with the intention to check email to see if anyone was up later than I was, emailing about that school thing happening next week or the dinner we’re hoping to schedule with friends, and two minutes later I’m out of the bed starting in on breakfast preparations.
Email used to be an annoyance to me. Now it’s friendly and useful.
The Big Boy Update: When I was leaving my children’s room tonight after reading them a story my son told me, “when I grow up and marry someone, I’m going to marry them in the bathroom.”
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter’s Orientation and Mobility teacher started working on building a map of the large play area that recently opened at school. She emailed today with some details: “We started by taking a walk around the play area to review what was there and where things were in relation to each other. Then we built a large map/model of the grounds. I have this map/model making kit and I added stones, cork stumps, a paper roll tunnel, etc. so we could make our model as close as possible to the real thing. Reese loved the activity and was quite serious about building things correctly. She was curious about where the various play areas were in relation to each other. Her main critique was that we hadn’t used real mulch and that we hadn't gotten the steps correct..."
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