This past Saturday, I made the decision to upgrade my son from a prepaid cellphone plan to a regular one (aka I now have the family plan). I really resisted this for about 3 years, because I simply did not trust my son to not run wild and crazy with the minutes. But when I learned that I could put a cap on the number of minutes he had to play with, I just went ahead and made it happen. I bought a refurbished phone as opposed to an expensive, brand new one, and I have allotted 500 minutes per month which should be more than enough time for my son to conduct his important 13 year old business. I told his mother about this, and I asked her to monitor his phone usage, when he is not in my presence. I also spent a good 20 minutes talking to my son, about the conditions that came with this new responsibility (good grades, don't take the phone to school, don't let anyone borrow it, stay under your minutes, no sexting, etc). And with all of that, I still feel like a sellout.

Just yesterday, I spent an entire blog entry waxing nostalgic about my first day of school and all the emotions that went with it, and nowhere in there did I discuss my cellphone. I got my first cellphone at age 23, and someone I was able to function just fine up until then. Now here I am trying to assuage my own guilt about buying my son one, and depending on when you catch me, it really isn't working. I wonder if I'm guilty of the "long-distance parent" syndrome, which magically causes one parent to heap unearned gifts on the child they don't see often enough. I wonder if the phone (even though its refurbished) is going to cause other kids around him to get jealous and (try) to fight him for it. I wonder if his grades will slip or if his mother will call me one day to say that she found female genitalia in his phone (its hard to be mad at that, but I'd ratchet up some anger somehow).

And then I come to my senses and realize that I am co-raising a good son, and even though he's at that age where kids really start testing their parents, he has rarely let me down in the behavioral department. Not only that, thanks to T-Mobile online, I can monitor his every text, phone call, and picture that comes in, and then I can call him up and ask him wonderful probing and invasive questions like, "What was going on at 4:45am when you received that text?" I'm quite sure he'll appreciate that. So this morning at 10am or so, when he receives the phone and the list of directions/instructions I typed up to go with it, I am sure everything will go smoothly...I think I've convinced myself with this blog entry..

Europe - The Final Countdown