I do a significant amount of communicating electronically. It's the not-in-person way to have conversations and share information. When I was growing up we could talk on the telephone or mail letters as ways to communicate. Today with the advent of the Internet, cellular network and vastly improved bandwidth, the ways to communicate are too many to enumerate.
When I was growing up and still today when you're finished with a phone call you say, "bye" or some other terminator statement before disengaging from the call. That's standard practice and I didn't think much about it until my daughter started just hanging up when she was done, abruptly ending the call. I gave her some pointers on phone etiquette and now she politely lets you know when she's ready to hang up. Sometimes, like the other day when she was talking to Aunt Rebecca, she says something like, "Can we wrap this up? My friend is here." She then says the traditional goodbye and is off.
It's different from text messages though. When is a conversation over? You send a message and expect the other person to respond. They might respond immediately or several days later, but usually the other person responds. Commonly that prompts another message from the first person. This goes back and forth until, when? When are you done? You don't say, "okay, bye" on text (or Facebook Messenger, or Twitter, or insert messaging protocol of your choice) because commonly you're only done, "for now".
I keep message chains on my phone that have been ongoing for years. It's like one long conversation punctuated by days, weeks, months or even years of inactivity. When you send or receive a new message, you just pick up with the new thread and start communicating again. I think about this sometimes because I am one of those kinds of people who talk a lot and by extension, type a lot. Initially, I would keep responding, not wanting to leave a message unanswered. If you have two people who do that though you never end, even though the purpose of the communication has been completed for some time.
So I think about it. When is there an understood, "Talk to you later. Bye."? There is such a wide range of behaviors in message responses that people don't seem overly upset if you keep responding or don't respond. Some people text more, some less. Some use more words and some are more succinct. I remember recently I asked my husband to type a response to someone on my phone because I was driving. I remember him saying, "that's a lot more words than I would have used." He's one of the fewer words people.
Blogs are the same I suppose. They're over when you don't write anymore. You don't have to end with, "bye, see you tomorrow." You'll be back when you're back. That being said, I'll see you tomorrow, writing about whatever my brain needs to get out of storage and offloaded here to free up space in my head.
The Big Boy Update: We went to Bring Your Parents to School at my son's school today. He has done a tremendous amount of work since school started. With the Adderall, he's a producing machine. Last year at this time it would have taken him eight months to have completed the same amount of work. He was nonchalant about it; it was just work he had done. He, his father and I did some work with currency and numbers. We deviated from the Montessori work and decided to come up with our own. We went by fives from ten to one-hundred, seeing how many ways we could represent the number in coins, laying out the variations under each number. We started challenging each other, saying, "can you do eighty cents in ten coins?" My son was almost as good at it as my husband and I were, which is impressive because a year ago he would have been confused by the idea and wouldn't have been able to do the work at all.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter went to my son's school with us tonight and spent time while we were in his classroom with one of her teachers from Toddler House. Elim showed us what my daughter had been doing when we got there and was clearly impressed. While my daughter went over to visit with the guinea pig again she showed us some wooden squares with different sandpaper patterns on them. The idea was to feel the patterns and match them up correctly with a matching three-by-three tic-tac-toe shaped board. This is easy stuff to my daughter but to someone who hasn't seen her in action and doesn't realize how easily her fingers can discern things it looks impressive indeed. Elim let my daughter take one set of the cards and its associated sheet to practice at home. We're going to have races to see who can do it the fastest. My son said he had a stop watch on his watch and he would time us. My money is on my daughter being the fastest. Bonus is she doesn't even have to close her eyes.
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