Remember when...?

I had to laugh when I read this article on MSN today... it just makes you realize how much the times have changed and well... I kind of feel old today!

Not only have my kids never seen a phone actually connected to a cord, but they were simply astounded when I said I never got to watch DVDs while growing up (even in high school, I believe my father got a beta VHS player from a friend). My kids do, however, know what a tape cassette looks like, simply because the library still has those to loan out ("books on tape").

They still expect every restaurant to have a "kids menu" (gosh, when did that start anyhow?) and have never known a time when they were allowed to sit in a car without being strapped in "something" (remember when you didn't have to wear a seatbelt in the back?). They have no idea what a book mobile is and have always grown up around a computer (I still remember being among the first at our school to get a home computer - an Apple computer! In fact, I even still have the computer I bought for college... a Mac SE II).

The fact that a woman has never been President of the United States baffles them and growing up in the melting pot of California has given them a self-confidence of "belonging" that I never had. The girls confided to me recently that their friends have told them that they look "kind of Chinese". They thought their friends were crazy! I had to laugh at that, but I didn't think it was funny that the single criterion was the alleged shape of their eyes. They still don't understand how people are categorized into "races", they just know that people come in different shapes, colors and sizes.

However, I do like that they don't seem to naturally categorize people - to them, people are just people. Most are nice, but some are mean. Isn't that what's really important anyway?