It dawned on me that my daughter will never know a world without cell phones, texting, sexting (god forbid), The Internet, and Facebook unless we move to the mountains of Appalachia and live amongst the Hill People. That’s never going to happen because her father and I love having indoor plumbing and 7-11’s on every corner.

When I was growing up we had one old IBM computer, a phone that plugged into the wall–a cordless one at tha t– and a Zenith TV you had to hit hard on the right side when the color went out. A far cry from today’s smart phones, laptops, and widescreen TVs.

I was nineteen or twenty when I got my first cell phone — a dinosaur by today’s standards. These days my daughter will have enough money saved up from the Tooth Fairy to buy her first phone by the time she’s seven. (This Tooth Fairy forks out a lot of dough, I hear.) Note to self: tell my daughter the Tooth Fairy retired.

I tried to imagine what my teenage years would have been like if we had cell phones, texting, and unlimited Internet. Cue the music from Aladdin because it woulda been A Whole New World! If I do break down and allow her to have a phone when she’s a teen I’ll have to take the good with the bad…just like The Facts of Life. Good: I’d be able to get a hold of her whenever. Bad: cyber-bullying and potential video-chatting with boys.

I guess I have to get over the fact that my daughter will grow up in a drastically different world than I did. Hopefully she’ll be an old soul and prefer how things were in the olden days — the days of Saved by the Bell Saturday mornings and when books were things on a shelf not in a Kindle. If not, guess we’re packing up and moving to Kentucky.