Have I told you I love my new ipod? Yes? Well, let me tell you once again.

I feel like Captain VonTrap calling up to my ipod, Maria, as she’s walking up the stairs. “You’ve brought music back into my life,” I tell her, my handsome Christopher Plumber face staring at her lovingly.

But this isn’t a music post. That will come later, along with a discussion of what I’ve been listening to and my favorites from all of your recommendations.

This is a technology post. My youngest daughter, Hannah, has been carrying around a little hand-held computer game she got from a Happy Meal.* She’s been carrying around this little toy, oblivious to its real purpose, and calling it her Ipod, “pipod.” Rachel is also excited about my ipod and calls it an “ipot.” It’s been good for them, too, this little music collection miracle holder. Rachel listens to her music on our drives to preschool. But she also listens to lots of my music–everything from Beethovan to Bob Dylan.

So, it’s a good thing, this charming piece of technology. And yet, there is something that makes me a little sad about the way technology is being introduced to my children so effortlessly. It’s not that I want them listening to clunky records. It’s just that I don’t know what it feels like to be that young and to be sending letters through the computer. Or even looking at video images of people on my computer as we talk to them on the phone. And my girls will never know what it feels like to wait more than a week for a letter to arrived from a loved one when they are in another country. Instead they will know text messaging and camera phones. I know that’s okay, but it makes me a little sad.

It is just one more reminder that we are not the same person, the three of us. Like that first time I dropped each of them off at a babysitter. Each time it was hard to accept that this child would have experiences that I would not witness and experience along with them.

Though I know I must accept that this technology will form their experiences in a way that I can’t completely fathom, I can make some decisions about how things are introduced. There will be no child-sized laptops for my girls. They won’t recieve their own computers until they are much, much older. The school my girls will be going to does not introduce computers into the curriculum until 3rd grade. That’s works for me.

I want my children to know what the pages of a book smell like, to write letters on real paper once in a while and send them in the mail, to be able to look at this painting right up here on my template and know something of what it may have felt like to have been that woman over 100 years ago.

And after I tuck them in their beds, I will sneak away to my secret lover, this internet. Who would have thought that I would have fallen so hard? Me, who reisted high-speed internet for so long, the woman who wants to sneak away into this painting and pop popcorn over an open fire while listening to Pa play his fiddle.

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*We haven’t gone to McDonald’s since we saw SuperSize Me. I know this must sound bad after my mention of Fruit Loops in yesterday’s post, but my kids eat well.